Awake, Aware
by Misaia
Summary: Before Steve Rogers disappeared off the face of the Earth, he agreed to an experimental procedure devised by Howard Stark that, if successful, would be used primarily for helping comatose patients wake up. It didn't appear to work, and so Howard put the project and Steve out of his mind. Full summary inside. Eventual Steve/Tony. Crosspost from AO3.
1. Implantation

**A/N: This is the prequel to my other work, "In Threes." **Written to: Song For No One - Miike Snow, crosspost from AO3

**Full Summary: **Before Steve Rogers disappeared off the face of the Earth, he agreed to an experimental procedure devised by Howard Stark that, if successful, would be used primarily for helping comatose patients wake up. It didn't appear to work, and so Howard put the project and Steve out of his mind.

So when the technology did begin to work, only Tony Stark, barely able to string three words together, was there to see it.

* * *

"Hey, listen, I'm definitely not supposed to be doing this," Howard called from over his shoulder as he piloted the plane over the dark French countryside. Steve looked down, trying to catch a glimpse of something, anything, but the dark ground below him offered up nothing, not even the lonely lights of a small village, and he swallowed roughly, feeling very, very small. He tried to ignore Peggy as she sat solidly beside Howard, her back stiff; tried not to look, tried not to think about what might happen next, what might happen if he went down there and Bucky really was dead.

"So I was wondering, might I ask you a favour?" Howard continued, squinting as he tried to make out the location of the plane. "In the interest of science, of course."

"Of course," Steve muttered absentmindedly. Bucky couldn't be dead. He would have felt it. It was just some sort of misunderstanding, he was sure. Surely it couldn't have been Bucky's unit that had gone missing, or maybe it was another Bucky. Not his Bucky Barnes, that was a common name, wasn't it? It had to be.

"It'll be for thought collection," Howard explained, tossing a paper-wrapped package back at him. Steve caught it, tore it out of its yellow packaging, examined the vial of clear liquid that it contained. "That liquid you see there contains a lot of experimental nanobots - in other words, tiny robots. They'll swim up to your brain and attach themselves there."

Steve raised an eyebrow at Peggy's back, but she didn't turn around. "Are you sure this is safe?"

"Not at all," Howard called back. "That's why it's experimental. But since you have increased regen, I figure if they start eating into your brain tissue, you'll just be able to repair it quickly enough without any lasting damage."

Steve rolled his eyes, even though the two in front couldn't see. "And this is useful for...what exactly?"

"Oh, lots of different things," Howard said noncommittally, reaching out the rub the windshield of the plane with a sleeve. "Primarily, if it's successful, for comatose patients in hospitals, as a potential way to get them out of their comas."

Steve thought that that was a good idea, but hesitated before popping open the cap of the vial. "Any other uses I ought to know about?"

"I'm sure there are plenty of other things it could be used for if this tech is successful," Howard said, pulling the plane into a smooth left turn. "Interrogation. Psychoanalysis. A bunch of other things. That's if it works, though. There's a very likely chance that it won't. That's why it's experimental. Now drink up, your stop's coming up pretty quickly."

Steve sighed, frowned at the glass vial in his hands, looked at Peggy's stiff back, then sighed again before popping the cap and tossing down the contents in one long sip. It tasted bitter and horrible, and he nearly gagged, but forced himself to swallow it down anyway. He concentrated, holding his breath, wondering if he could feel the nanobots swimming up his bloodstream to his brain, but couldn't feel anything.

"You'd better jump!" Howard shouted back at him, pressing a few buttons on the control panel and opening the exit doors. "Good luck! Come back safe!"

As Steve dove out of the plane, he heard Howard mention something about fondue to Peggy, heard her laugh. Wondered, hoped, prayed that he'd see her again.

* * *

When he came back with Bucky, Howard Stark insisted on a thorough examination of his brain to make sure the nanobots had taken, that they were working. Steve sighed, but obliged; Howard had done quite a lot of things for him, he reflected as he looked down at the new vibranium shield he carried.

Howard pushed him into a medical tent, commanding him to take a seat on one of the cots, before pulling a silvery device with a large bug-eye lens and a black screen out of his pocket. He ordered Steve to lie back, and Steve obeyed, laying his head on the thin cotton pillow provided and staring up at the flapping white panels of the medical tent.

Howard whistled a tune that Steve didn't recognise as he slathered Steve's forehead with some cold gel that smelt vaguely like lemons and antiseptic and pressed the lens to Steve's skin. Steve watched him as he rolled up his coat sleeves and moved the lens around on Steve's forehead, checking the screen every once in a while, hemming and hawing and muttering to himself, occasionally leaning over and jotting down a few notes on a yellow notepad with a blue ballpoint pen. He wondered if he and Peggy had had fondue. If Peggy had liked it, and smiled at him, and laughed.

"Peculiar. Very peculiar," Howard finally concluded, pulling the lens off Steve's forehead with a little squeaky pop and handing Steve a wet wipe to rub off any extra gel.

"What's peculiar?" Steve asked, fearing the worst. "Are they really eating my brains away? I can't feel anything."

Howard looked at him as if he'd just said he was ready to defect to Nazi Germany. "No, don't be silly," he said after a moment. "They're not eating your brains. Your brain is completely fine."

"Then...what's wrong with me?" Steve asked, sitting up and fiddling with the crumpled up wet wipe.

"Nothing's wrong with you, per se. The nanobots are in place, everything's fine in that regard." Howard held out the screen, let Steve look at his brain scan, explained that the tiny green blips - which Steve thought were just specks of dust - in the wrinkled folds of Steve's brain matter were the nanobots. "I knew the nanobots needed an incubation period, but when I tested them on rats and dogs, they'd already started transmitting signals within five hours. Granted, they weren't very interesting thoughts, and were mainly pictures, pictures of food and bones and rubber balls or the like, but they definitely should have begun transmitting signals with you by now."

"Are you sure they're working?" Steve asked uncertainly, looking at the green specks again and wondering how this was possible.

"They are," Howard affirmed. "If they weren't working, they wouldn't have hung on to your brain. They're definitely on. They just aren't...giving me any data."

"Is there any way to get them out?" Steve wanted to know. His fingers, without him being aware of it, had torn the wet wipe to a tiny pile of damp shreds.

"Short of me cutting out a good amount of your brain tissue, or until they stop working, no," Howard said, sighing and standing up, stowing the device and his notes back into his coat. "And they'll only stop working if you die; they run on energy generated by the motion of your blood flowing. So, as you can see, unless you can manage to get yourself killed, there's no way to get them out. I haven't thought that far ahead yet."

"I see," Steve said, standing up as well and picking up his shield. "Well, I suppose that's that, then. I'd better get going, if you don't mind, see how Bucky's healing up."

"Of course, of course," Howard said, waving him off, and Steve quickly left the medical tent, wondering if there was any possibility that Howard was lying, that he could see all his thoughts at this very moment from another of his high-tech devices hidden inside his coat. Steve shook his head to clear it. He tried not to think about it as he stepped into another tent where Bucky was resting, pasted a reluctant smile on his face, and put the issue of the nanobots from his mind.

* * *

The next time he thought about them was as he was hurtling towards the icy ground and dark water of the Arctic Circle. Sure, he was thinking about Peggy and how he'd probably never see her again (and he thought probably, because surely there was some possibility), and then he got to thinking about her fondue-ing with Howard Stark in Paris, and that led him to thinking about the nanobots that Stark had implanted inside his brain.

He took a deep breath as the ice floes and dark water came rushing up at him, braced himself for impact, and wondered if this meant he was finally free.

* * *

Years later, Howard Stark carried his new baby son into the nursery he and Maria had designed especially for him. Its walls were painted a lovely, creamy blue, and it had a beautiful view of New York City with its rising skyscrapers. A nice summer breeze blew through the slightly open window, filling out the gauzy white curtains like sails, and Tony looked at the glittery buildings and the little mobile of airplanes above his head as his father set him down, gurgling happily and reaching out to try and touch them.

Howard grinned and bent down to press a soft kiss to the soft, downy curls on his son's head, and smiled as he enveloped Maria in a hug. Over her shoulder, with the smell of her jasmine perfume in his nose, he looked around the nursery, at miniature toy table designed like a motherboard circuit, plastic tools and blocks lying in tubs along the wall for when Tony was old enough to sit up by himself and play with them. Howard was determined he would be an engineer when he grew up, and had outfitted the nursery with some of his older experiments, the ones with large parts that children and babies couldn't choke on.

Unless those children and babies in question were particularly determined, he thought, as he took a glance over at the crib. Anthony, not even three days old, already had that determined set about his mouth, the very one that had made Howard fall in love with Maria.

Maria giggled against his shoulder. "This baby has more gadgets than a Samsung factory," she teased him, and Howard bent down to tickle her cheek with his mustache. "What does he even need with all this stuff anyway?" she asked, pointing towards a silver device with a huge lens and a black screen adorned with green specks connected to a monitor embedded in the wall; the monitor was projecting the pattern of green specks like spots of algae in an ocean floor aquarium. "Does that even work?"

Howard wrapped an arm around her, resting his head on top of hers as he looked at the green-spotted monitor and thought about Steve Rogers for the first time in years.

He shrugged. "I don't know if it does. But at any rate, he'll have some pretty glow in the dark lights to look at."

She nudged him in the stomach with her elbow. "That's if he ever stops trying to figure out a way to get himself up to play with the airplanes," she said, laughing. "Look! He wants to hold one."

Tony gurgled at them from his bassinet, waving his fists up in the air, and Howard smiled fondly down at his son, turning away from the monitor and any thoughts of Steve Rogers, wondering if his life could get any better than this.


	2. Of Fairy Tales and Nietzsche

**A/N: **I've never read Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche, but he's a famous philosopher for nihilism, which is basically the belief that nothing matters and that life doesn't have a purpose. Some pretty depressing stuff to think about.

Written to: I Could Be the One - Avicii & Nicky Romero

* * *

"Maria, just look at him!" Howard said, wrapping an arm around his wife's slender shoulders and beaming down at Tony. Tony, all of four months old, barely able to sit up by himself, had managed to push a variety of differently shaped blocks into a toy box that Howard had put in front of him. "He didn't even hesitate, not once! And you know how tricky those trapezoids are. But he did such a good job, didn't you?" Howard leaned over, pressed a kiss to Tony's messy dark hair, and Tony smiled back at him from behind his pacifier, which bobbed up and down in his mouth.

"You'll be a fantastic engineer, just like me, won't you? Who's the brilliant little engineer in training?" Howard asked, tickling Tony's stomach; Tony laughed in delight, clapped his hands, dropped his pacifier on the ground. He pouted at it for a moment before picking it up and examining it.

"No, no, sweetie, don't put that back in your mouth, it's dirty now. Let Mama wash it for you, and then you can have it back," Maria said, reaching out for it.

Howard grasped her wrist as she stood up to take the pacifier to a sink. "Come on, Maria," he said, grinning up at her. "I didn't hire Jarvis for nothing."

"It's such a trivial thing," Maria muttered, tugging at the hemline of her skirt nervously. "I wouldn't want to bother him about it when I could so easily do it myself."

Howard rolled his eyes, but she could see the firm set of his jaw that indicated he was irked about something. "Well, alright, go do whatever you want. But you can be damn sure that I didn't become one of the wealthiest men in the world so that I could continue living like an ordinary person."

Before Maria could tell him not to curse in front of Tony, Howard had shouted for Jarvis. The British butler that Howard had hired (and of course he had to be British, all butlers were British, according to him) glided into the nursery with brisk steps, bowed to Howard, gave a gentle smile and nod to Maria before asking Howard what it is the master wished for.

"Bring up a tumbler of Scotch for me, if you don't mind. On the rocks," he said, flicking his wrist to indicate Jarvis was dismissed. Jarvis nodded, though Howard had already turned back to watching Tony empty the box out and start banging the coloured blocks around as he tried to fit them into the holes.

"Anything for the mistress?" Jarvis asked, turning to her. "Would you like me to wash that for you, or give you a new one for the young master?" he asked, pointing to the pacifier in her hand.

Maria forced a smile, shook her head. "No, thank you," she said, briefly wondering if she ought to bring up the subject of why drinking at two in the afternoon - and in front of a child - wasn't good. She decided quickly that it was probably best not to bring it up, not when Howard's back was just stiff lines and tension underneath his burgundy vest and shirtsleeves.

She supposed she could tell Tony - if he were to ask when he got older - that his daddy just had a penchant for apple juice. Apple juice that didn't smell particularly good and that burned the throat when it went down. Although, judging by the determined look in her son's eyes as he banged a green pyramid into a hole, he wouldn't be that easy to convince, and she wondered how old he would be before he started questioning her about it.

She wondered what she'd say then, or if by that point Howard would already have sobered up and come down from the high he seemed to have been on ever since Stark Industries had taken off and become one of the world's most influential businesses. She hoped that would be the case; at any rate, Howard and Tony seemed to be getting along rather well, she thought, as Howard scooted himself over to lean against the base of the bassinet and loosened his tie.

* * *

Later that afternoon, as the sun was casting long shadows across New York's skyscrapers and setting the building windows afire with reds and golds and oranges, Maria cradled Tony in her lap and read him a fairy tale.

"And do you know what the princess did then?" she asked Tony, who looked up at her with huge dark eyes, his pacifier bobbing in his mouth as he sucked and looked at her questioningly. "Not even a guess?" she asked teasingly, smoothing wisps of dark hair away from his forehead and pressing a kiss to the crown of his head. He smelled like formula and milk and baby, and Maria grinned as she turned the page. Tony slapped his hands on the paper, pointing at the colourful pictures with pudgy fingers.

"Maria."

Howard's voice came soft across the nursery, but Maria flinched at the tone it held. As he approached, his steps a little shaky, Maria caught the sharp whiff of alcohol advancing in front of him. She let the book fall to the nursery carpet, its large text and pictures open for Howard to see. He toed it away with disgust and plopped himself down, cross-legged, in front of the two of them.

Maria held Tony close to her, but Tony, all of four months, smiled in delight at his father and reached out for him with chubby hands. Howard took him in his arms and opened another book, the title of which contained "Thus," from the brief glance Maria caught of it before Howard bent it over his knee and began to read to Tony in a droning voice slightly slurred with drink. There were no pictures in this one, and Tony pouted a bit, reached out for the other book that still lay open on the carpet, but Howard leaned over and pushed it towards Maria, out of Tony's reach.

"You can never get them started too early," he explained to her, as if what he was doing was perfectly logical, as if a four-month-old baby would in any way be interested by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. "Come now, Anthony," he said very sternly, "pay attention. The man who wrote this was a very influential philosopher. He's famous for the saying, 'God is dead.'"

Maria sighed and folded her hands in her lap as she watched Howard read philosophy aloud in a droning, boring voice. She wondered if it was wrong to hope that there was a God, wondered if it was wrong to hope that Tony wouldn't turn out to be anything like Howard.

Behind Maria's turned back, the blank monitor speckled with green thrummed a little bit, the green spots lighting up brilliantly for just a brief moment. When Howard looked up, the colour had all but faded away, until the monitor looked dull as always.

* * *

**Steve:**

I heard something today.

I don't know what it was. It was a man. The voice seemed really familiar, but I don't know whose it was.

He was reading a book, I think. It didn't sound particularly uplifting. Rather depressing, actually. God is dead? That doesn't sound good.

There was another sound, also. It sounded like a baby. But that doesn't really make any sense. I don't know much about babies, but in general, I thought you were supposed to read babies picture books and fairy tales? Don't ask me. I'm not an expert.

Are you even listening? Is anyone listening? Can anyone hear me? I mean, if I heard that man and that baby, surely there must be some way they can hear me? Or is it like a one-way mirror?

I've got so many questions. I wonder if I'll hear them again. Maybe next time, I'll be able to ask them.


	3. Fantasy

Written to: Hey Brother - Avicii, crosspost from AO3

* * *

"You really ought to stop filling his head with trash," Howard commented, leaning against the doorframe of the nursery. Maria stiffened, Tony a squirming, warm ten-month-old bundle in her arms, but didn't look up from the fantasy novel she was reading aloud. "Magic isn't real, and you oughtn't to indulge silly fantasies."

Maria kept her mouth shut about the rather extensive collection of Lord of the Rings paraphernalia that Howard had amassed in his teenage years, and still kept in the wine cellar. Frodo would have the hardest of times getting out of that one, she reflected, bottles of the finest Cabernet and Pinot Noir and Chardonnay to block his exit from the Shire. She wondered if Howard was ashamed of them, if they were reminders of a time when he had nothing and was still struggling to get by.

"He's just a child, Howard," Maria said, trying to keep her tone light and non-combative. "Surely it wouldn't be too harmful if he were allowed a few indulgences here and there along the way."

Howard must have been in a good mood that afternoon, because he just shrugged and disappeared. Maria breathed a sigh of relief as she heard his footsteps echoing down the corridor, began to read again, in a quieter voice.

* * *

"What's this?" she asked one evening a week or so later, when Howard plopped a fat stack of comics, still in their plastic sleeves, in front of her. The bright covers depicted a muscular blonde man, a circular shield with a star emblazoned on it hanging from his arm. There was an A on his blue mask, and Maria would never admit it, especially not in front of Howard, but the artists had depicted him with an absolutely lovely pair of legs.

"That's Captain America," Howard said, as she turned the comics over in her hands and Tony banged his plastic spoon against his tray table in the high chair beside her. "Daddy worked with him, you know," Howard informed Tony as he sat down heavily in his chair, allowed Jarvis to uncover a silver dish of steak and potatoes. "He was a hero during the war, before you were even a thought in my mind."

"What kind of work did you do with him?" Maria asked curiously, reading the summary off one of the backs of the books. She wondered if Howard featured in these.

"Am-ca?" Tony asked, looking at Howard and pointing at the comics with his spoon. Howard smiled indulgently through a mouth of steak.

"That's right, Anthony. America. Can you say it again? Cap-tain A-mer-i-ca."

Tony screwed up his face, twisting his little lips as if it would help him pronounce the syllables better. "Ca-tin Am-ca."

Howard shrugged, taking a sip of his red wine. "I suppose that's close enough. Your daddy and he were friends. Sort of. More like acquaintances than anything."

"What kind of work did you do with him?" Maria repeated patiently, turning her attention to Tony and trying to convince him to take another spoonful of mashed carrots. Tony turned his head to the side, and a thin streak of orange ended up on his cheek. Maria sighed and wiped it off with his bib.

"Well, obviously there was the super serum," Howard said, and Maria was a little irritated that this was the most civil interaction they'd had in weeks. "But that was Erskine's work, not mine. If it had been me, it certainly wouldn't have taken so long to develop, and we wouldn't have needed half of Brooklyn's electricity to introduce it into the specimen."

Of course you wouldn't, Maria thought to herself, stopping herself from rolling her eyes just in the nick of time. She only made a small hmming sound, more as a sign that she was listening than as an agreement with Howard. Howard didn't seem to notice, or if he did, didn't care.

"No, what I did with him was nanobots," Howard said, tilting his head to the side and beckoning Jarvis to pour him more wine. Maria caught Jarvis's eye as he bent over the wine glass, saw a sympathetic look there, and turned back towards Tony again. Tony had decided that his skinned grapes were quite aerodynamic, and had taken to throwing them across his tray table and onto the floor. Maria tried to persuade him to eat one instead of throwing it, but he just smiled mischievously at her (and of course she had to smile back, how could she not?) and continued working on his aim.

"They're tiny robots," Howard said, drawing her attention back to him. "They were supposed to work in thought transmission. I told Steve - that's Captain America, just a side note - that they would be used in helping understand thoughts of patients in comas as well as some sort of communication device for these people who were otherwise indisposed to talking. I mean, I had to say something good, he was such a goody two-shoes, you know? It was like we weren't even in war."

"Right," Maria said, wiping Tony's chin with his bib. Tony managed to throw a grape far enough that it bounced off Jarvis's shoe. Maria sighed apologetically, but the butler only smiled at Tony and bent down to pick up the grape.

"I was going to use them for interrogation of prisoners of war, see what they knew," Howard continued noncommittally, no longer seeming to care if Maria was listening or not. "But of course Steve wouldn't have stood for that. So that's the whole thing about the patients in the comas. It didn't end up working, though, so no love lost there. I never got a single signal from him."

At that moment, one of Tony's skinned grapes went sailing through the air, plopped straight into Howard's freshly filled wine glass, splattering red all over his crisp, white, dress shirt. Maria froze, watched the liquid seep into the starched cotton, watched an angry flush creep across Howard's face. Tony didn't seem to notice that anything was wrong, and laughed and clapped his hands at how silly and red his daddy looked.

"Howard, it was just an accident," Maria said, standing up, automatically placing herself in between her son and her husband. "He didn't mean it, did you, Tony?"

Apparently, a fresh bout of giggles from Tony didn't make it any better, and Howard pushed her aside none too gently, roughly unlatched the tray table and tossed the whole lot onto the floor, grapes rolling every which way. He grabbed Tony roughly, knocked away Maria's hands, and stomped away.

Maria looked at Jarvis with anguish, but the butler had already bent down to start wiping up smears of mashed carrot and picking up grapes. She hurried after Howard, and got to the nursery just in time to see him plop Tony down into his crib with a glare and a stern warning to "stay there until he learned to behave himself like a decent person."

Maria made a move to pick Tony up - he was starting to cry, sensing that something was wrong - but Howard grabbed her wrist harshly, and she could almost feel the bruises start to form underneath her milky skin.

"Don't you dare," he snapped at her, and she could smell the alcohol on his anger. "Bad children get punished." This was directed at Tony. "And you can't continue to encourage him like this. I have a son, not a daughter, in case you don't remember."

Maria felt her heart wrench as Howard dragged her from the nursery, and she saw Tony's little fingers reach out from the bars of his bassinet, saw his little anguished face and heard him start to cry in earnest. His wails of "Mama" were muffled by the thick wood of the nursery door as Howard snapped it closed behind them.

"He's only a child, Howard," she argued. "They need comforting and playing and snuggling, and this is not what he needs. Listen to him!"

Howard's eyes were steely as he looked at her. "You don't tell me how to raise my child," he snarled at her. "This," - he raised his arms to either side, indicating the rich decor of the corridor, "is all mine. I have made this for myself through my own hard work and dedication, and I'm not going to let you spoil that with your silly, backwards notions of childcare."

He stomped off down the corridor, and Maria felt tears prickle behind her eyes. She looked at the nursery door, behind which Tony was still crying, and broke out into full fledged sobbing as she leaned her forehead against the nursery door. She didn't enter.

* * *

There it was again. The man's voice. There was a woman's voice this time, too, though. She sounded sad, kind of angry, but the man was angrier. And then they left, I guess, because there was a door slamming.

There's a baby crying. It's been crying for a while now. I wonder why the man and woman don't come back...?

I'll try talking to it, but for whatever reason, I can barely form any words. My lips feel frozen, numb, so I guess I'll settle for "Ssshhhh."

...

It stopped crying. Wait. Hold up. I think it's trying to say something...?

"Mama?"

Well, I'm not your mum, that's for sure. I don't actually know who I am, where I am. But I guess I can let you pretend I'm your mum for just a little bit, so you don't keep crying. It's making my head hurt.

"Shhhh."

"Mama!"

Okay, well, you don't have to laugh. But anything's better than that horrid wailing you were doing earlier. I wonder whose kid you are? I'll have to have a stern talking to your parents some time, if I can ever get my lips to move again.


	4. Mask

Maria missed going out, and, granted, Howard had never said she couldn't go out and do grocery shopping, sit in the quiet corners of street cafes with a good book and the occasional cigarette, just so long as she didn't track ash and the scent of smoke back into the house. But she was sick of wearing huge, dark sunglasses to cover up black eyes, red rimmed from crying, was sick of wearing long sleeved shirts and turtlenecks in the humid New York summer to hide the black and blue marks of fingers clenched tightly around flesh in drunken anger.

She was tired, above all things. She sat in front of her vanity every day, applying pancake makeup, rubbing it in circles into her skin and trying to make Howard's anger disappear like the amber liquor he tossed, burning, down his throat in the evenings and afternoons. As she looked at herself in the mirror every morning after waking up, she wondered if Howard was right, and every morning, without fail, she managed to convince herself that he was.

She was stupid, she wasn't going to deny that. She didn't have some prestigious university degree from a fancy Ivy League school like Howard did; she hadn't read various works of philosophy, like Howard had; she had no head for numbers and couldn't manage a multimillion dollar company like Howard could. She was nothing, Howard was fond of saying, and she ought to be grateful that he had rescued her from that little diner in Brooklyn where she'd been working as a waitress with no foreseeable future.

Was she a coward? she mused as she smoothed foundation over the planes of her cheeks. She supposed she was; she would have gone to somebody, would have talked to somebody about this if she wasn't. Jarvis had tentatively skated across the subject with her one afternoon while Howard was on an international business trip, had tutted as he examined her slender wrists that still bore a circlet of black and blue.

_"Mistress, I may be a bit presumptuous in saying this," he had said, "but perhaps you ought to talk to someone about this? This is not right. I could do it for you, if you would like. Alert authorities."_

_His fingers had been smooth against her skin, had been kind and gentle, but she had flinched away all the same and told him that it wasn't any of his concern, that she was handling it._

Was she a bad mother? She didn't personally think so. Sure, she was prone to fantasies and daydreams, and enjoyed storybooks with huge pictures and text and creamy colours, but that didn't make her a bad mother, she didn't think. Tony was happy, she thought, smiling to herself behind her sunglasses as she watched him play in the sandbox with a few other toddlers. He was growing up to be a very fine boy, with a mass of dark curls on his head that tended to fall into his eyes, with an infectious smile and lovely little dimples and a knack for managing to ask at least ten questions containing the word "Why" for even the simplest of conversations. It was his favourite word. That, and "How."

She supposed it was the scientist in him; he simply couldn't help it, not with all the science texts Howard read to him and all the electronic equipment strewn around the nursery amidst brilliantly coloured blocks and toys. She watched him play make believe with a Captain America action figure, and silently prayed that his budding sense of creativity and curiosity would never be squashed. She wasn't going to let Howard do that, she determined, her mouth set firmly. Not to her son. She might have let it happen to her, but she'd sooner throw herself off the Brooklyn Bridge than see it happen to Tony.

The only concession Howard made towards child-appropriate things was a fat stack of Captain America comics that Maria always made sure were lined carefully in Tony's bookshelf at the end of the day, spines facing out, numbers all in order. Tony loved reading the books, would convince her to lie down on the nursery floor with him while he read out loud in a high-pitched, stumbling voice that tripped over big words. He would pick up a Captain America action figure, would fly it through the air and make all the sound effects with his mouth twisted in all sorts of shapes, and Maria couldn't help but smile.

"Mama," Tony said, "is Captain America better than Superman?"

Maria smiled down at Tony, already all of two years old and growing faster and faster by the day. Soon he'd be off to some sort of accelerated pre-school and the house would be dead quiet in the mornings; she stored the sounds of his round vowels and syllables in her memory so she wouldn't be too lonely when he inevitably went off.

"Hmm," she said, pretending to think very hard. "I don't know. What do you think?" she asked him.

"I think Captain America is better," he said quickly, as if he had been waiting for her to ask him all along.

"Why do you say that?" she asked him, smoothing an errant curl behind his ear. She would need to take him to get a haircut soon; it was growing rather long.

"Superman is so silly," he said, as if that explained everything. "He has bunches of powers and is super strong and super fast, but if he puts on glasses and a blue shirt he isn't Superman anymore. How come, Mama? And how come no one knows he isn't Superman?"

Maria smiled sadly. "Well," she said, tapping her chin thoughtfully, "I suppose he puts on a disguise so that people don't see he's Superman."

"But whyyy?" Tony asked, looking up at her curiously. "Why wouldn't he want to be Superman all the time?"

Maria shrugged. "Maybe Superman is very sad," she said. "He probably misses his home - because Superman's not from this planet, remember? He's from somewhere far off. He probably misses his home and his mum and dad, but he doesn't want anyone to know he's sad, because he's supposed to protect them, so he has to put on glasses and a blue shirt and they make him feel better."

Tony frowned, processing the information. "I guess," he said unsurely, after a long pause. "But I still think he's very silly."

Maria smiled, leaning over to press a soft kiss to Tony's forehead. "Yes," she agreed. "I think he is very silly, also."

* * *

I'm starting to hear things all the time now. I wish I could tell you why, or how, or who they are, or even what's going on. I'm not even sure if these voices are real, or if they're just some auditory hallucinations or the like.

I don't remember a lot. I know my name is Steve Rogers; I know I couldn't go to war because of the draft and my physical condition, my reports all stamped across with big, glaring F's; I was born on July 4, 1920 in Brooklyn; my dad, Joseph, died when I was a kid, so I don't remember much of him; and my mum died when I was...fifteen? because she had pneumonia. My best friend is Bucky Barnes; he got selected to fight, of course he did, Buck was always good like that, perfect, strong physique, smart, intelligent, had a way with the girls.

I wonder where I am? Maybe it's a set of recurring dreams that somehow make progress every night.

That woman really does sound sad, though. She cries a lot after she puts her son to bed (I'm pretty sure it's her son, unless Tony is a girl's name now), when she thinks nobody can hear. I want to tell her that I can hear her, but my lips are still kind of stiff. I've been trying to mouth words, but it's still rather hard to move my mouth and tongue around to form the sounds.

She was talking about Superman and a man named Captain America with her son today. I've heard of Superman, sure, every kid's heard of Superman, but who's this Captain America fellow? He sounds like a great guy, really patriotic, really knows what this country's all about.

I wonder what his civilian name is? It's probably something cool. With a superhero name like that, it has to be cool.


	5. The Whisper Man Likes Flowers

Written to: Hoppipolla - Sigur Ros, crosspost from AO3

* * *

Howard wondered where he'd gone wrong. He could see the flinches behind Maria's rigidly held shoulders and perfect posture every time he reached out for her to stroke her cheek, to smooth back errant strands of hair that were falling over her forehead. He knew it was wrong, what he was doing, that the bruises and the angry fingerprints left all over her wrists and hips weren't accidental.

It wasn't him, though, he swore it wasn't, couldn't have been him. He loved Maria more than anything in the world, but he needed the liquor, he needed it to deal with his anxiety and paranoia and he thought if she could just accept that, they wouldn't have anything to worry about. He didn't recognise the person he was when he was drowning in an open bottle, but he was pretty damn sure that it wasn't him. Maria didn't seem able to tell the difference, and slowly, but surely, she was growing away from him. He despised it.

And so Howard threw himself into his work, into Stark Industries, watched its stock rise to exponential levels. Watched the numbers tick into his bank account in first a trickle, then a gush, then a positively massive deluge of dollars that as a young child he never would have thought possible, never would have thought that anybody in the world could have so much money, never would have thought that he would own even a fraction of what he did. His workers complimented him on his brilliance, his customers and clients told him how innovative he was, how he would surely make it onto Time Magazine as Person of the Year before too long.

And that was all fine and good, Howard thought to himself as he sat in his favourite armchair by the library fire and stared moodily into a snifter of brandy, but unfortunately the only person that really mattered to him didn't seem to see this. But he needed this, he thought to himself as he mulled the brandy around in his mouth, wincing at the burn as it slipped down his throat. He couldn't imagine not having this, and he couldn't imagine not having Maria.

He loved her, really he did, but she would lie underneath him at nights when he was making love to her, would stare up at some point on the ceiling just over his left shoulder, and more often than not he would just roll off her and lie on his side. Sometimes he heard her crying quietly to herself when she thought he was already asleep, and he wished he still knew how to comfort her.

Tony seemed to be the only one who could do that these days.

And that was another thing: his son. Howard could see himself in Tony's dark eyes, in the curve of his smile, in the dark curls that flew every which way as Tony ran about the nursery, examining all Howard's old and/or broken inventions or pretending to be Captain America.

"You can't be Captain America," Howard had pointed out one day, and he'd felt so incredibly bad and sorry and regretful as Tony's eyes had filled up with tears and his lower lip had started to quiver. "It's just that you're not blonde and tall yet," Howard quickly tried to amend, but it was already too late, the damage had been done, and Tony screwed up his face and began to wail.

Maria quickly ran into the nursery, got down on her knees to hug Tony to her and whisper soothing words into his ears. Howard sighed, rubbed his temples; Tony's crying wasn't doing any wonders for his hangover, and he quickly left.

* * *

He wasn't quite sure how to communicate with his son, this young human creature who looked so much like him. Often when Jarvis picked Tony up from school, walking with him the few blocks from his kindergarten, Tony's Captain America backpack slung over his shoulder and Tony's tiny hand clasped in his own, Tony would get into the apartment, kick off his shoes by the door, and would run upstairs to find his mama. Sometimes he would glance over at Howard in his study and say "Hi," with the sweet burbling cheerfulness only a child of four can have, but Howard rarely replied, lost already in a tumbler of whiskey, and Tony's tiny introductions came less and less and finally began to stop altogether.

For the most part, Howard acknowledged Tony, gave him little harrumphs and nods whenever he saw him running around in the halls of the apartment, and for the most part, Tony would try to avoid Howard in a constant, childish game of hide and seek. He didn't particularly understand this man he was supposed to call Daddy, but his mama had told him that that man really was his Daddy and he was supposed to call him that, and his mama was usually right about these sorts of things.

"But Mama," he asked her one evening, when she and Jarvis had come to see his kindergarten open house - Howard was conspicuously absent, though Maria was sure she had left no less than twenty reminders about the open house stuck on Post-It notes around the apartment. "Daddies are supposed to come to open houses. So Jarvis must be my daddy!"

Jarvis tutted as Maria turned her head slightly, trying not to let the sudden flood of tears that pressed against her eyelids to fall. "Young Master Stark," Jarvis said, politely not looking at Maria while she composed herself, "let me tell you, if I were your father, surely you wouldn't have that unruly haircut and you would already have mastered the noble game of chess by now."

Tony giggled brightly as Jarvis tickled him fiercely under the chin, his face crinkling in an agreeable smile as Jarvis picked him up and suggested they have a spot of ice cream to celebrate the young master's academic achievements. Maria blotted her eyes with a handkerchief, sniffed a bit as she scooped up Tony's drawing of a flower, and followed the two out the door.

She wondered what Howard was doing, why he hadn't come, and then decided that it was better not to know.

* * *

"Put my picture up there," Tony commanded, pointing to a blank spot on the nursery wall next to the giant black and green TV monitor. Since he'd grown up, they had moved the crib into storage and had replaced it with a small bed with Captain America sheets per Tony's incessant requests.

Maria smiled at her son, reached out and ruffled his hair; it really was rather wild, she mused. Perhaps Jarvis was right; she ought to go and get him a haircut sometime soon.

"I didn't hear a please," she teased him, and Tony gasped in indignance before squealing in laughter as she tickled him.

"Please, please, Mama," he said, breathless with laughter. "I want the picture to go there, please."

"Much better," she said with a small smile, before leaning over, peeling off a few pieces of tape from a roll, and sticking the flower to the wall. "Why do you want it here?" she asked, as she smoothed the lines of tape with her thumbnail. "You won't be able to see it very well, because the light comes in from the window here."

"I want the whisper man to see it," Tony explained, already lying on the floor and poring over a Captain America comic.

"The whisper man?" Maria asked, not really paying attention. "Who is the whisper man? Your imaginary friend?"

"He's not imaginary, Mama," Tony said, looking at her, affronted. "He whispers at night, shhh, shhh, shh, that's what he says."

"Mm. Is that right?" Maria said, smiling at her son and wondering if the window shutters weren't closing properly. "He just whispers at you?"

"Yeah," Tony said, nodding vigorously. "He says that all the time."

Maria smiled, reached out to ruffle Tony's hair, and thanked whatever gods there were that her son still had the capacity to imagine.

* * *

_The Whisper Man. That's what the little boy calls me. I guess it's a kind of cool name, but it makes me feel like a rapist or a child molester. Or something like that._

_He talks a lot, this kid. His name is Tony Stark, and his mum's name is Maria, and his dad's name is Howard. He says his daddy makes lots of electronic things, that he's super smart, but he doesn't come to his open houses and doesn't like flowers and that sometimes he makes his mum cry. That doesn't sound like a very good father to me, in my opinion, but what can I say? My dad was an alcoholic and died when I was still a kid. I don't really remember him._

_Tony says he has a butler. Or a butter. But that wouldn't make sense, so I'm assuming he has a butler named Jarvis, instead of a dairy product by the same name. I wonder what it's like to be rich enough to have a butler._

_This Tony kid sometimes reads to me, or at least I think he's reading to me. He reads me comics, from what it sounds like, and he does all the sound effects too. He's a big fan of this Captain America fellow, and never forgets to tell me that his daddy told him he worked with Captain America._

_Today he told me, long after his mum tucked him in, that he put up a picture for me to see. I couldn't see it, of course, but I made a shhh sound that I think sounded curious, and reassuring. I hope that one day this Stark kid can make something so that my thoughts can get transferred into words, that would be really convenient since he seems the only person I can communicate with. And he seems rather bright, so it surely can't be too much to hope for._

_Why does the name Howard Stark sound so familiar? I'll have to remember to ask that._


	6. Marks

**Note: The term 'Holocaust' was used in regards to Nazis in 1933 after a major book burning. It was used after World War II to refer to the genocide. In the timeframe of this story, Steve is still mentally 'stuck' in ~1940 or thereabouts; as such, Steve has no idea as of yet what exactly happened in WWII after his crash, nor of any other major events in US/World History since then.**

* * *

Tony had just freshly turned seven and finished his first quarter of third grade when his report card came in. It was a brisk October evening, and the brilliant, bright lights of New York shone into his bedroom window while he hummed to himself and read The Whisper Man a Captain America comic. Once in a while, the Whisper Man would whisper back, "shh shh shh" at a particularly interesting part, like when the Captain punched Hitler right in the nose and sent him running, with his silly square mustache all in disarray. Tony giggled at that part too, but he didn't know who Hitler was. Some bad man, he thought, though he had the same mustache as Charlie Chaplin in those black and white films that Tony liked to watch with his mama.

But this Hitler fellow looked rather mean, Tony thought, and not like Charlie Chaplin at all. The words the artists had given him had a lot of -tsch endings, and it was very hard to pronounce, but Tony tried his best to replicate him so that the Whisper Man could hear also.

His parents were out for the evening, on something called an 'anna-versry.' Tony had no idea who Anna was, and wasn't really sure that he cared. His parents were probably at some fancy restaurant drinking that disgusting red stuff that came in the green bottles (Tony had snuck a taste once, just a little sip, and had afterwards desperately begged Jarvis for a cup of milk, and then another one after that) and eating disgusting grown-up food that didn't even come in interesting shapes.

Jarvis had tried to explain to him that anna-versries were things that adults did after they got married, and that they did it every year. Tony was horrified by this; how could adults stand eating boring, non-shaped food and drinking disgusting red stuff that looked kind of like Kool-Aid but wasn't? He firmly told Jarvis that if that were the case, he would never get married.

"Is that right, young master?" Jarvis asked, his eyes twinkling as he stirred a pot of macaroni and cheese - with superhero themed macaroni noodles - for Tony. "You don't ever want to get married? Not ever?"

Tony frowned down at his steamed broccoli, shoving a little tree in his mouth and demolishing the florets. Jarvis tutted at him in disapproval, even as Tony smiled up at him with green between his teeth.

"Not ever," he said with a mouth full of broccoli. "I don't wanna get married and have anna-versries. Can't I just stay here with you and eat macaroni and cheese all the time?"

"What if you find a strapping young lass - or lad - that you want to get married to?" Jarvis asked, bringing over a bowl of macaroni and cheese. "Then you'll want to have things besides macaroni and cheese on your anniversaries with them." Jarvis sighed and brushed a fatherly hand over Tony's unruly hair as the little boy dug eagerly into his bowl of noodles. "Although I am flattered that the young master would like to spend the rest of his life with me eating cheap noodles from a box."

"I don't wanna marry anyone," Tony said firmly, reaching for his glass of milk and taking a sip. "Never ever."

Jarvis smiled at Tony's childishness, and didn't even say anything when Tony put his elbows on the table and continued to eat.

* * *

Howard was in a rather good mood as he pulled into the apartment building's garage. He had easily gone through a whole bottle of wine by himself, and he was feeling rather nice. Maria hadn't flinched away from his touch even once, and she'd oohed and aahed properly, like a good wife should, at the expensive diamond necklace he'd bought for her.

It was really a beautiful thing, he thought to himself as he watched her get out of the car, admired the sparkle of seven expertly laid diamonds glittering across the lines of her collarbones. The seven diamonds were arrayed, three small ones on the edges, growing increasingly bigger towards the centre, until the biggest diamond laid directly in the hollow of Maria's throat.

But it wasn't nearly as beautiful as her gentle smile, and Howard hoped, prayed, believed that he could make it work again.

* * *

"I'll just get the mail quickly, and then I'll be up," Howard told her, and Maria smiled, nodded, and pressed the button for the lift that would take her up to their penthouse apartment.

Howard hummed to himself as he slotted his mail key into the box, missing on the first try - but that was expected, he had, after all, gone through a whole bottle of wine by himself - and laughed at his clumsiness. He got it on the second try, pulled out some assorted bills, some junk mail, and a sealed envelope from Tony's elementary school.

Howard turned it over in his hands, slitting it open with the edge of his key. He tugged the paper out of the envelope, shook out the folds with one hand, and read it to himself as he stepped into the lift.

His expression grew stonier and stonier as the floors ticked by.

* * *

"'Talks a lot in class, is somewhat mischievous in a cunning, amusing way,'" Howard read to Maria, and his dead tone of voice was sobering in that Maria had no idea how to read it at all.

"'His grades are good: Outstanding in History, Outstanding in Language Arts, he can type 78 words a minute.'"

Maria still had no idea what the issue was here, but she felt her good humour quickly evaporating. The diamond necklace suddenly felt extremely cold and sharp against her throat.

"Guess what mark he got in maths. Guess."

When she remained silent, Howard upended a table next to her. She gasped as the glass front of the table smashed into a million tiny shards with the force of his rage.

"Damn it, woman, I told you to guess!" he shouted at her.

"...Satisfactory?" she asked, her voice no louder than a whimper.

Howard slammed the paper down on the glass coffee table in front of her, and for a moment Maria envisioned the glass of the table shattering, pushing their diamond-sharp ways into Howard's hand, making deadly paths through his veins and straight to his heart...

"Passing!" Howard roared, his finger jabbing at the 'P' on the card. "He's just passing! You tell me, Maria, how such a brilliant little boy can be so damn stupid! Is he even my son?"

Cowed by the force of his anger, Maria hugged her elbows and didn't say anything. That was when Howard turned his anger on her.

"Is he even my son?" he screamed, and this was getting outrageous, really, couldn't he see that Tony was the spitting image of him? "No son of mine could be so horrid at simple, basic arithmetic! I'm going to get a paternity test, see if I don't!"

Maria trembled and wondered how she could possibly placate her husband, wondered how she could save Tony from his father's fury as the diamonds pressed cold and unforgiving into her skin.

* * *

Tony had been reading to the Whisper Man when his parents had come home. He had gotten to a particularly exciting part with Captain America's loyal sidekick, Bucky Barnes, when he heard his father begin to yell.

"Hold on," he said, apologetically; it was rather rude to stop at an exciting part of the comic, and he was sure the Whisper Man was a bit irked by that, but he wanted to hear what his father was shouting about this time.

His heart froze in his chest as he heard his father shouting his name. Something about passing, and tests, and grades. A huge smash and crashing as something fell over.

Tony listened, straining his ears in the sudden silence that followed, before a door slammed and footsteps began to stomp up the stairs. Fear made his heart leap into his throat, and he hurriedly turned out the desk light, shoved the comic haphazardly back into its shelf, and told the Whisper Man to be quiet.

The footsteps were beating rapidly down the corridor as Tony flung himself into bed, drawing the blue comforter up over his head and trembling as he squeezed his eyes tight shut, hoping his father wouldn't come in.

The heavy footsteps stopped outside his bedroom door, and Tony thought that perhaps his father wouldn't. His hopes were quickly dashed as the door slowly creaked open.

Tony held his breath, trying not to shiver under his covers, and strained his ears trying to listen for his father's footsteps across his bedroom carpet. Where could he be? Tony wondered.

A few very, too-long minutes passed, in which Tony prayed to any higher being in the universe that his father would go away, when he heard the door begin to creak closed again and then shut with a soft click. He waited a few moments before letting out a deep sigh of relief before tossing off the covers and making to go back to his desk.

Howard's glare met him the instant he flung off the comforter, and he couldn't help but scream.

* * *

The little boy really loves to read comics to me. Always Captain America, never anyone else.

Captain America fights Hitler. Bonks him straight in the nose. Can you imagine that? I would laugh if I could, but I can't. I can only make this shh, shhing noise that stutters kind of like laughing.

But really, what a straight up guy. Fighting Hitler. I remember him, broadcast all over televisions with his rousing German speeches and his talks about deportation of non-Aryan races and that funny little square mustache. He wanted to build a bigger, better Germany after their horrid defeat in World War I, I guess, and that Treaty of Versailles that really kind of screwed Germany over.

Tony read to me about the Holocaust, and he said it was a really, really bad thing that not even his mama would tell him about. I don't think it's a really, super horrible thing, book burning; I mean, yeah, it is pretty bad, but I can't imagine it being so bad that his mum didn't want to tell him about it.

Then he went off to eat dinner - superhero mac and cheese, he told me when he got back - and continued to read to me.

Then all of a sudden, he told me to be very quiet, and so I obliged him, even though he had stopped at a really cliffhanger-ish part of the comic.

I can't hear anything.

...

A scream.

"No, Daddy, no, stop, stop, stop!"

Or that's what it sounded like, anyway. He was crying too hard, and there was a great deal of yelling and smacking and heavy things falling over. I wanted to say something, tried to say something, anything, but I could only make those stupid little shh shh sounds that I'm sure no one heard anyway over all that noise.

He's only just left, Tony's dad, slamming the door behind him. Tony sounds like he's crying, but it's sort of far away like he's not at his desk, which he says is where he is when he reads to me.

"Shhhh, shhhh," I try to tell him, and he just tells me to "Go away, Whisper Man, I don't want to talk to you right now," and that is that.


	7. Times

Ever since the incident with Tony's 'passing' marks in math, Howard Stark had withdrawn further and further into himself, like a turtle pulling itself into his shell. He absolutely refused to believe that that little dark-haired child upstairs in the bedroom with the Captain America bedsheets was his son, that somewhere along the way he'd been replaced through some mad government scandal or something of the like. And though Maria had a gentle talk with Tony an hour or so after his father had stormed out of his room, banging the door closed behind him, even though Tony's marks in math were improving at a rapid, impressive pace, Howard still refused to believe that there wasn't something inherently wrong with Tony.

Whenever Maria tentatively tried to broach the subject with Howard, on good nights when he wasn't blind drunk and raving at the ceiling about governmental conspiracies and intelligence agencies that Maria had no idea about, he would just sigh, turn over and face her, his dark eyes holes in his face.

"The boy has no direction," he said, whenever she tried to talk to him about Tony. "I don't know, Maria. Sometimes I just don't know what I'm going to do. Stark Industries needs a successor, and I'm not so sure I want to entrust my multibillion-dollar company to someone who doesn't have the motivation to keep it going and will only run it dry to the ground with his fantasies and what have you."

Maria wanted to protest that Tony did have a direction, but that he was only seven years old and wasn't quite ready to explicitly state what that particular direction was, but Howard always cut her off before she could get a word in edgewise.

"You think too highly of the child," Howard said, an air of finality in his voice that signaled the conversation was over. "He'll never get anywhere in life if he has his head in the clouds and can't bring himself back down to work at sums and integrals. You need that to be an engineer, and no son of mine is going to be anything but that. You understand, Maria?"

No, she wanted to say, she didn't understand what his obsession was with making sure Tony knew how to derive the circumference of a circle or the volume of a cylinder. She didn't understand this mad need to focus solely on math, math, math, didn't understand why Howard frowned at the parent teacher conferences Maria forced him to go to whenever Tony's teacher smiled and praised Tony's vivid imagination and creativity. Maybe it was the very fact that she forced him to go to these things; she just wanted the appearance of a solid, supportive family unit, and Howard certainly couldn't present that image locked up in his study with a bottle of cognac, now could he? At least in that one area he'd agreed with her: he needed to maintain a positive image to keep the company's stock in good shape, to maintain a competent appearance for his professional life.

"So what you mean to tell me is," Howard said, interrupting the teacher's gushing praise about Tony's summarisation skills, "is that you place much more emphasis on the humanities."

"Well, you see," the teacher began, but Howard cut her off. Maria shot a sideways glance at him, but he didn't look back at her.

"Where is the arithmetic? Where are the integrals, and the derivatives, and surface areas? Do you teach computer science, coding, programming? Python, C, C++?"

The teacher looked dumbfounded, and Maria really felt for her. She was a young girl, probably just fresh out of school herself, and she still had that rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed look that showed she was - or tried to be - optimistic about the world and everyone in it. She was far too young to truly understand pain and fear and anger, and Maria shot her an apologetic look that she didn't seem to catch.

"Er, no, Mr. Stark, they are only in third grade -"

Howard sighed in disgust, shook his head, muttered something derogatory about the American education system, and even from this angle, Maria could see the beginnings of tears forming in the girl's eyes.

"At any rate," Maria said cheerfully, too cheerfully, too forced, "we're glad to know Tony's doing well in school. If you have any pressing concerns about his work, please don't hesitate to call us."

And with that, she took Howard's hand and dragged him out of the classroom. The teacher was far too glad to see them go.

* * *

Howard would not speak to Tony for two years.

* * *

"So can you say anything other than 'shh'?" Tony wanted to know, sitting at his desk and doing a math worksheet. He was his times tables and kept getting stuck on the 12s, and the Whisper Man was being no help at all, being that he could only say 'shhh'.

"Shh."

"Yeah, can you say anything besides that?"

"Shh."

Tony groaned in frustration and stared at his times tables worksheet in despair. The 12s were so tricky; he always got caught up with 12 times 11.

"But you understand me, don't you?"

"Shh." This one sounded slightly affirmative, but that might just have been Tony's imagination. Tony frowned

Tony frowned up at the black monitor speckled with green spots that hung above his desk, fiddled with the small instrument on his bookshelf, the huge lens reflecting light onto the opposite wall. The Whisper Man spoke through that, he was sure of it, because when he whispered the green spots would light up a little bit brighter and move around.

"Okay. One shh for yes, two shhs for no. Okay? Do you understand?"

"Shh."

"Can you say anything besides shh?"

"Shh shh."

Tony frowned. "But you can think of other things besides shh, right?"

"Shh."

"...Can you help me with my math homework?" Tony asked, looking up at the screen hopefully. The green dots lit up, swirled around, stopped.

"Shhhh...?" This one sounded questioning, almost as if someone were saying, "Sure...?" like they weren't very sure they could but would most certainly try. Tony took it as encouraging.

"Okay. Good. Can you remind me what 12 times 11 is? 121?"

There was a brief pause, the green dots swirling frantically on the screen. "Shh shh."

"132?"

"Shh."

Tony beamed, writing the answer down in the little box. "Thanks, Whisper Man, you're the greatest."

"Shh."

* * *

Before Tony went to bed, he told me that he would have to try to figure out a way so that I could talk to him, because this whole 'shh'ing business was really getting rather boring. I can't help but agree, and I'm very glad that he didn't ask me to try to count 'shh's to help him with his math homework. The mere thought of trying to 'shh' 132 times is frightening; I can feel my lips drying out already.

Not that I can feel my lips. I still can't. I just assume they're there.

He said I was the greatest. I don't know if you heard, but if you didn't, you'll just have to take my word for it.

It makes me feel all fuzzy inside, warmer than I've felt in a long time.

Tony tells me a lot about his dad, and about his dad's company, and about how his dad is scary and frightens him a lot and likes to drink the brown stuff from the funny glass bottles. His dad wants him to be an engineer, or so Tony said, and engineers have to be super super good at math.

I really do hope Tony figures out some way so that I can talk to him, in words instead of 'shhs.' I can't imagine I'll be particularly helpful when it comes to trying to help him with derivatives or what have you, if I'm just sshing all the time.

I wonder if I still remember maths from school? I'll have to check. It's not like I'm short on time or anything.


	8. The Most Precious Things

Written to: Signal Fire - Snow Patrol, crosspost from AO3. Today is my birthday.

* * *

The next time Howard talked to Tony, it was because Tony wanted to, and because Howard had run out of excuses and was too tired to think of a new one for why he couldn't see or talk to his son.

Tony was ten.

"Father," Tony said, peeking around the corner of the study door, peeping in at his father. Howard was sitting at his desk, staring into a swirling tumbler of whiskey and wondering where he'd gone wrong in his life. Stark Industries was doing better than ever, its stock rocketing through the roof at an almost alarming pace. Though it had ended a decade and a half ago, the war in Vietnam was still fresh in everybody's minds, compacted even more by the fear of the Soviets and nuclear weapons that no one saw but everybody talked about. Stark Industries now worked primarily in defence, but under the surface, if one bothered to look just the slightest bit past the politics and the bullshit, one could easily see that the company was all offensive.

It made Howard's head hurt, looking at his fleets of engineers tightening nuts and bolts on high-tech rifles, looking at his scientists in the labs in their sterile white coats holding up tubes of bacteria that, if given the chance, would decimate entire races. It made him feel sick, the power he held in the palm of his hand; he was tired of playing God, and tried to drown himself in alcohol, but didn't seem to be able to sink under deep enough.

And then there was Maria, and the boy, of course. He had taken to calling himself Tony, instead of a proper gentleman's name like Anthony; Maria had shrunk away from him, and Howard could feel the cold column of mattress between her body and his as they slept together at night. He hadn't lifted a hand against her, not in a very long time.

Howard hated to admit it, but he was tired. He was just too damn tired, and felt like all he was really doing was dying.

"Father."

Tony's repeated address made him look up. The boy was getting tall, shooting up like a beanpole, but the childish roundness hadn't left his face yet. Howard squinted past the afternoon sunlight painting Tony's face, and in that moment, he saw a tall young man, dressed in a sharp tuxedo, tugging at the corner of a well groomed mustache with one hand, a glass of champagne in the other. It was him. It was not him. And Howard had no idea about supernatural things, didn't think they existed, refused to believe in premonitions, but he would swear that in that instant, he had seen the man his son would grow up to be.

"I want to learn how to program."

Howard was startled by this. Tony hadn't shown any interest at all in the technical subjects, sneering at computer science books, rolling his eyes at derivatives and integrals (though Howard was surprised and pleased by how quickly he picked up the fundamentals of differential calculus), and had instead been more inclined towards the humanities. Howard had eventually given up, and the science texts and clinical papers collected dust in neat piles in the corners of Tony's room.

"And I want a tool kit, and access to materials."

Howard stared at his son in disbelief, wondering what could possibly have prompted the change. Surely it couldn't have been Maria's doing.

"I - what kind of materials?" he stuttered, clearing his throat and eyeing his son with bloodshot eyes.

"Pipes, tubes, electrical wiring, stuff like that. Science stuff," Tony said, chewing at his nails and wondering if he had pushed his father too far.

There was a long pause during which Howard pinched his thigh under the table to make sure he wasn't dreaming. He wasn't, and winced as the sharp sting traveled up his leg.

"Yes, you may," he said after a while. "But you must always make sure to have Jarvis escort you to the laboratory. I will make sure to keep it well stocked."

Tony nodded his head, smiling in satisfaction. That had been a lot less problematic than he thought it would have been. And maybe now he could make The Whisper Man talk again.

* * *

Tony pored over the computer science manuals that his father had given him, reading up on Python, Java, C++, everything. His father had delegated one of his employees to be a CS tutor for Tony, and every day after school, Tony would spend at least two hours with Ms. Peggy Carter, a woman in her sixties or seventies, her dark hair mostly white. She had laugh lines around her eyes, and wrinkles around her mouth, and Tony liked how she always kept butterscotch candies in her pockets and gave them to him when he had completed a particularly difficult coding task. She told Tony that she had once used to be a friend of his father's, back during the war, when Howard's hair was still all dark and he didn't have silver at his temples, when he didn't have worry lines around his face.

She told him that, after a person very important to her had disappeared, she had picked up coding as a hobby, as a way to hide her emotions behind the impersonal facades of numbers and binary numerals. Tony wondered who the important person was, and Ms. Carter showed him an old, faded picture she kept in her wallet of a strong blonde man. He looked like a very nice man, Tony thought to himself, but Ms. Carter never told him what his name was. Just that he had been a very good friend, and that Ms. Carter had liked him very much.

With Ms. Carter, Tony learned the ins and outs of computer science, how to create infinite loops, how to create signals and pathways of coding and solutions where none existed.

Once Ms. Carter had asked him why he wanted to learn all of a sudden. And Tony had thought about The Whisper Man, had smiled brightly up at Ms. Carter, and had told her that he wanted the Whisper Man to be able to talk again.

And Ms. Carter had smiled indulgently down at him, her laugh crinkling the corners of her eyes, and had told him his parents must be blessed to have a boy with such a vivid imagination. Tony didn't correct her.

* * *

The evening he plugged the little screen and lens apparatus into a computer, he was confronted with a login screen password.

Username: HStark.

Password: _

Tony frowned, tapping at the keyboard unsurely. He hesitantly tried a few words. Whiskey? Alcohol? Stark? What would his father like? None of the passwords worked, and he frowned at the screen.

His father had made these things during the war, he thought to himself, and maybe he hadn't been into drinking then. He sighed, frowned, and decided he would ask his father about it tomorrow.

* * *

Howard looked at Tony blearily, trying to get over a hideous hangover.

"Whaddaya want?" he slurred at his son, trying very hard not to vomit all over his desk.

"The password to the lens and drive in my room," Tony said, very quietly, so as not to aggravate his father's headache. "You know, the one under the monitor with all the green specks."

Howard groaned, rubbed at his eyes with his hands, rummaged around his desk for a pad of paper and a pen. In shaky handwriting, he scribbled something down, folded the paper and handed it to Tony, who took it but didn't unfold it.

"It's the things most precious to me," Howard muttered, gripping the edge of his desk and thinking very hard about pleasant things, peaceful things. Waterfalls, kittens, ohms and circuits and motherboards...

* * *

Username: HStark.

Password: M4r14 4NTH0NY ST4RK

* * *

Tony grinned as the drive took his password, allowed him to open up his programs and run them. He looked up at the green specks, how they started swirling around curiously, then more quickly.

Hello? the screen read out.

Tony had to bite his cheek from squealing in delight. Only babies did that, and he was already a big boy.

"Hi, Whisper Man," he said in delight.

There was a pause while the green specks frantically darted around the screen.

You can see this?

"Yes! I can! It worked, Whisper Man, I did it! You can talk now!"

I could always talk.

"Well, I can see it now. So now you don't have to shh anymore. Though I guess you'll need a new name then."

I have a name.

"You do?" Tony asked. "What is it?"

I'm Steve.

"My name is Tony!" Tony crowed proudly, grinning from ear to ear. If he was looking carefully, he would swear the monitor's speckles rearranged themselves into a smile.

Yes. I know.


	9. Pepper

Written to: Up and Up (Acoustic) - Relient k, crosspost from AO3

* * *

"I'm going to high school tomorrow, Steve! Can you believe it?" Tony said with glee as he sat in front of his monitor and talked to Steve. His bedroom windows were open, and a soft late summer breeze was sifting through the windows, making the white curtains billow out towards Tony and tickle his bare ankles with their silky touch. Just this year, Tony had managed to sit in his swivel chair, all the way back, with his feet touching the floor. He'd made Maria measure him against the wall where she'd marked his height every year with a light little pencil, and this year both of them had been vastly surprised to find that he'd hit five feet without anyone noticing. He was growing all the time, shooting up all straight and skinny like a string bean, all elbows and knees, and Maria smiled at the too-short hems on his jeans and the too-small shoes discarded in his closet, and told him that he would have to decide on a final height so they could buy school clothes for him.

He'd been accepted to the United Nations International School in Queens. Maria had helped him work on the application, staying up late to help proofread his essays, crossing out grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, making small suggestions to where he ought to place his sentences for maximum effect. Howard had approved, but only because a well-rounded high school experience would look good on university applications, and he had more than enough money to cover the $30,000 tuition fee. Howard had been Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1991, where the headline had described him as a benevolent innovator who had made the technology of today possible.

Maria had bought a copy of the magazine to frame, and the instant Howard had seen it hanging on their bedroom wall, he had smashed it on the ground and ripped up the pages.

He wasn't a good man, and he knew it. The Time photographers had concealed the dark purple bags under his eyes with heavy layers of foundation, had covered up the wrinkles that layered his forehead and the corners of his mouth with concealer. Stark Industries was a booming firm, that was definitely true, but if anybody knew what the scientists were really producing in their labs, if anybody knew what the engineers were exploding deep in the middle of uninhabited deserts...well, they might have to reconsider the magazine's cover person. Howard couldn't sleep at night for the visions of mushroom clouds and hydrogen bombs tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, closer than anybody in America realised...

Are you excited? The screen read out, and Tony grinned at it.

"Of course I'm excited, Steve! I got placed in Honours Biology, and guess who's in that class with me?"

Who?

"He's got a fuddy duddy name," Tony said, checking his backpack once, twice, thrice to make sure he had all the necessary school supplies for tomorrow. "It's like James Rupert. But everybody calls him Rhodey. He's my friend!"

Is that right? That's good, you'll have a friend in your class.

"Yeah, I'm really excited. But he's not my best friend."

No? Who's your best friend, then?

Tony scoffed. "Pfft, you are, Steve, obviously. But I don't think I can take you to school with me. Your monitor is too bulky to fit in my bag with my notebooks and pencils and stuff. Sorry."

That's okay. I wasn't very good in school anyway.

"How old are you, anyway, Steve?" Tony wanted to know. His mother was calling him to come and have dinner, and he called back that he would be down in just a minute.

I'm 20.

Tony, who was all of thirteen years old, laughed. "You're super, super old, Steve. Practically ancient. But I have to go now, I'm going to have dinner with Mum and Dad, but I'll be back later, okay? And I'll tell you all about how tomorrow goes!"

Okay. Bye. Have fun. I'll talk to you tomorrow after school.

* * *

Tony waved goodbye to his mother, who stood by the gates of UNIS with a little sad smile on her face. She had insisted on riding with him and Jarvis (Howard was still asleep with a hangover) to school, even though school started promptly at 8 AM (Tony thought this was practically criminal, he didn't like waking up in single digit hours). Once his mother was out of sight, Tony looked down at the campus map he held in his hand and hurried to his first class in biology, hoping to get a seat next to Rhodey.

Once he got in the classroom door, Rhodey smiled at him from the left of the classroom, where he was sitting next to a pretty blonde girl with black glasses and her hair all tied up in a bun. She smiled over at Tony, held out her hand as he walked over to sit on the other side of Rhodey.

"Hello there. I'm Pepper Potts."

Tony wanted to laugh. Pepper Potts was such a silly name. But she was kind of pretty, and Rhodey seemed to think she was okay, so Tony guessed he could let it slide.

He would have said more to Rhodey, but at that moment their professor walked in and harrumphed, signaling the start of lecture. Tony looked over at Rhodey, couldn't catch his eye - his friend was too busy whispering to Pepper - and sighed, opened his notebook, and began to take notes.

* * *

Rhodey wanted to sit with Pepper at lunch, too, and they laughed over grapefruit cups and crustless sandwiches, and Tony pouted, wishing Steve was there. He was a little cheered up when Rhodey turned back to him and asked him what clubs he was going to join - Tony wanted to join the robotics club, but he was also sort of iffy about joining the classic literature club that Rhodey wanted to join, the club's weekly meetings interfered with robotics programming sessions on Thursday afternoons.

"What can be so interesting about boring old robots?" Pepper asked, laughing. Her tone wasn't malicious at all - she sounded rather clueless and airheaded about the whole thing - but Tony smarted a bit, and wished (not for the first time that day) that Steve could be there.

* * *

How was your first day at school? Steve's monitor greeted him the moment he walked through his bedroom door and dropped his backpack on the floor by the desk.

"Not very good," Tony muttered, flopping down on the bed and throwing his arm over his eyes. "There's this girl, her name is Pepper Potts. That's a really silly name, isn't it?" He rolled over onto his stomach to see the monitor feed.

A girl? Do you like her? Steve wasn't one to mince around questions. Tony liked that about him.

"No, definitely not," Tony said. "I think she's annoying. I don't like her one bit. I think Rhodey does, though. Maybe."

The green speckles on the monitor darted around playfully, and Tony could swear Steve was laughing at him. "Don't laugh at me," he pouted.

Sorry. It's just funny. You'll like her someday, probably. Maybe.

Tony wrinkled his nose. "Ew, no. Never. Never, ever ever."

If you say so.


	10. Finding the Right Person

**A/N: Keep in mind that Steve is mentally stuck in ~1940, before he joined the war effort, pre-serum and everything. Let the awakening begin. **

* * *

His mother had told him to always be nice to girls, but Tony felt that in some cases exceptions had to be made. Pepper was one such exception.

Tony found her absolutely irritating and annoying, with her high pitched voice and the way she tossed her hair carelessly over her shoulder and how she talked to Rhodey about classical literature and poets and managed to somehow divert the conversation whenever it turned to something that Tony might want to talk about. It wasn't even that Tony didn't like classical literature and poetry - he could quote at least a dozen of Shakespeare's sonnets, though he really wasn't sure what many of them meant. Maria had told him that a lot of them were about love, which Tony found absolutely horrifying, but his mother had only laughed and told him that one day he would appreciate them and his ability to quote Shakespeare at a lovely girl.

And that was the other thing. Whenever he went over to Rhodey's house after school or on the weekends to work on school projects, the conversation would always some way, some how, turn to Pepper. Rhodey would always look out his bedroom window with dreamy eyes and talk about how lovely her hair was, how pretty her smile was, and because he and Rhodey were friends, Tony just nodded and said noncommittal "uh-huhs" and "yeahs" to indicate some semblance of paying attention. He didn't find Pepper attractive - in fact, he didn't find any girls attractive, not in the way that Rhodey seemed to. Once, while Rhodey was downstairs getting a cup of juice, Tony had dropped his pencil and it had rolled under Rhodey's bed; when he had wriggled underneath it to look for it, he found, amidst the dust bunnies and lonely socks, was a magazine with a naked girl on the front cover. Out of a sense of morbid curiosity, Tony had tentatively opened it, had flipped through a few pages, and had been only scientifically fascinated by the slick mounds of breasts and the curve of muscle underneath spread thighs, had no interest whatsoever in whatever might lie behind those silky scraps of fabric that the women called underwear. Tony thought it was all very confusing, and thought that if he were a girl, he would still much prefer wearing his boxers, thank you very much. At that moment, Tony heard Rhodey's footsteps on the creaking stairs, grabbed his pencil, and wriggled back out from under the bed.

Seemingly over the month of August, Tony had shot up another six inches, and his mother had almost cried as she measured him at 5'7".

"You're growing up so fast, my sweet baby boy," she had exclaimed, tears in her eyes as she wrapped him in a tight hug. Tony had been surprised to find that he could tuck his chin over his mother's head, was shocked to find thin strands of silver winding their way through Maria's dark hair.

"Look at you!" she had said, standing back from him and smiling up at him, and Tony wondered when she'd become so small. "You're practically a man already. When did my sweet little baby boy get so big?" she wondered, looking up at him.

Tony only shrugged noncommittally and didn't know how to tell his mother that her 'sweet little baby boy' had had to figure out how to use a razor on his cheeks and chin from how-to videos on the Internet, how he'd accidentally cut himself more than once. Didn't know how to point out to her that his voice was dropping, deepening, by the minute, the hour, the day, the planes of his cheekbones emerging sharp underneath his eyes.

_Your voice has gotten deeper,_ Steve observed one day while Tony was busy working on a report for his world history class. Oracle bones were incredibly fascinating, Tony thought to himself, and wondered how hard it was to learn Chinese. Surely his father couldn't object to that, could he? Chinese was a pretty useful language.

"Yeah, Steve, I'm growing up," Tony said, laughing. He was surprised to hear himself, still expecting to hear the giggles of a little boy and instead hearing the deep laugh of a man.

_How tall are you now?_ Steve asked.

"I'm 5'8" right now, but maybe I could grow a little bit more. I don't know."

_If you keep growing, you'll be bigger than me,_ Steve said, and Tony could swear there was a bit of teasing in there.

"How tall are you, Steve?"

_I'm 6'2". _

"Oh, that's super, super tall," Tony said, scribbling down some notes on the Shang Dynasty. "That's taller than my dad."

_How is your dad, by the way? You don't talk about your parents much._

"I dunno," Tony said, chewing on the end of his pencil and staring at his computer screen. "We don't talk much. I don't want to talk to him."

_Why not?_ Steve asked. If Tony were really being honest with himself, Steve sounded concerned.

"He's too busy with work and stuff, and whenever he talks to me I feel like he doesn't listen to anything I have to say. He just wants me to do this, to do that, and he's always trying to get me to meet the daughters of some of his work friends, and he makes me dress up in these really tight, itchy suits just to take them ballroom dancing or eat cucumber sandwiches at the Four Seasons. I don't even like cucumber sandwiches, and I don't like the girls either."

_I remember when I was growing up, I had a calendar of pin up girls at home,_ the screen read out._ I hid it under my bed so my mother wouldn't see. _

Tony wrinkled his nose at the screen, though Steve couldn't see it. "I saw something like that at Rhodey's house once. They don't make me feel anything," he confessed to Steve. "I don't know why. Maybe I haven't found the right kind of girl yet?"

_Perhaps. I didn't find one, either. _

* * *

After saying good night to his parents and telling Steve he would talk to him in the morning, Tony furtively opened a new window on his computer, typed 'pin up girls' into the search bar. He scanned over the presented images with disinterest, eyes roving over a vast selection of women with long, curvaceous legs and sultry, pouty lips slicked with lipstick. There must have been dozens, hundreds, thousands of pin up pictures, and he had a feeling that if he kept on scrolling, he still wouldn't find any girl that appealed to him.

He leaned back in his desk chair, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands and wondering what was wrong with him.

More on a whim than any real curiosity, Tony cleared the search bar, typed 'pin up boys' into it. Just to see.

He found his mouth drying as his eyes scanned rapidly over chiseled abs, strong jawlines, felt a stirring in his pyjama pants. Horrified, he hurriedly closed the window, cleared his search history, and stared at the soft glowing desktop of rolling fields, the images still dancing before his eyes.

After what felt like forever, a little window from Steve popped up.

_I thought you were going to bed? Why are you still up? Don't you have school tomorrow?_

"Uh, yeah, yeah, I do," Tony said, swallowing thickly and shaking his head to clear it. It didn't help. "I was just finishing up something. Goodnight, Steve."

_Goodnight, Tony. _

* * *

_Tony's growing up very quickly. It's exciting, and a bit sad at the same time. I remember when I was still his age - well, that was only a few years ago, but at any rate. If he keeps growing at the same pace, he'll be my height, or taller. _

_One thing that sort of concerns me is how absent his father seems to be. Granted, his father does own like a multibillion dollar company or something of the sort, but I personally don't think there's any job in the world that should stop you from being a father. I used to think that joining the army and being a soldier was a job that could qualify for that exception, but now that I think about it, not even that should stop you from being a parent. But I mean, I don't know anything about running huge companies, or what Howard Stark is like at all. _

_I haven't yet figured out who Howard Stark is, or why he sounds so familiar. He just doesn't sound like someone I like, but maybe that's because Tony's been complaining about him for years now. _

_And has it been years? This whole concept of time, and consciousness, and life in general, is just confusing, and I prefer not to think about it. While Tony is at school, I usually talk to myself, thinking about penguins and how they look like miniature waiters in tuxedos. I really like penguins. They're very cute. _

_Speaking of cute, we talked about pin up magazines and calendars today. Me and Tony, of course, not me and myself and the imaginary penguins. And I told Tony that I hadn't found the right person, but that was sort of a lie. I had found the right person, but he was the wrong gender and he would have been horrified if I'd told him I loved him desperately, unrequited, all-consuming. It would have destroyed us, I think, our friendship. But it was so hard not to like him; he was everything a young, asthmatic, underweight boy would want to be, he was tall, had a strong jaw, had a laugh and a strength that showed itself whenever he shook your hand or clapped you on the back for a job well done. It was hard not to be attracted to him, and I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't an innocent little crush on my part. It was full blown infatuation. _

_But as years have gone by - and has it been years? Let's not talk about time - I've had a lot of time to think, and I've sort of determined that I wasn't really in love with Bucky. I was just in love with the idea of him, and the possibilities he presented. If you'd been in my position, you would have done the same. _

_I wonder where he is now? The last time I saw him he was getting ready to leave for war. I hope he's safe, not lying in some unmarked grave somewhere. That would be frighteningly sad, and I don't think even little penguin waiters could comfort me. _

_Speaking of lying, the pin up girls thing wasn't the only lie. I said I was 6'2", kept making jokes about how soon Tony would be taller than me. Why did I say that? I'm only 5'5"._

_Where did 6'2" come from? _


	11. Imagine

Written to: Photobooth - Death Cab for Cutie, crosspost from AO3

* * *

"I am really very concerned about Tony," Miss Shreve, Tony's World History teacher at UNIS, said to Maria and Howard one brisk November afternoon. She noted that Tony's father didn't really seem to be paying attention, and appeared to be looking dazedly over her shoulder out the window, where grey clouds were gathering on the horizon; they would get snow that night, Miss Shreve felt, and was supremely annoyed by this. She hated the snow, the grey slush that it turned into after only a few hours on the New York roads, how it would frost over on her car's windshield and make her pull out her winter parka and gloves from the closet so she wouldn't freeze to death on her drive to work. It annoyed Miss Shreve even more that Howard didn't seem to be at all involved in his son's progress. If she were being kind, she would say Howard Stark had come to the mandatory meeting a little bit tipsy, his breath sweet with the tang of liquor; if she were being honest, Howard Stark was drunk out of his mind, and Maria had had to support him walking through the door.

"What about Tony?" Maria asked anxiously, worrying her hands in her lap. "Is there something wrong with his academic performance?"

"It's not his performance, exactly," Miss Shreve said, turning back to Maria after shooting a disapproving glance at Howard; Howard seemed not to notice, and Miss Shreve wondered, not for the first time, how exactly this man of all people was the owner of one of the largest corporations in the world. "It's his attitude in class. He is often very inattentive, and usually doodles in his notebook when he is supposed to be taking notes. Additionally, he doesn't seem to get along well with others. His project partner, a young lady by the name of Pepper Potts, has often complained about him getting quickly irritated and snappy with her."

"In fact, besides young Mr. Rhodes and somebody named Steve, it does not appear that Tony has made any friends during his time here, which, as I'm sure you can understand, is rather concerning."

Miss Shreve folded her hands and looked across at Maria and Howard. Howard was still staring distractedly out the window, his eyes bloodshot, and Maria was picking at a knot in her skirt. At the mention the name "Steve," Howard started, turned to her for the first time.

"Steve?" Howard asked, his words slurred. Miss Shreve wrinkled her nose at the wave of alcohol fumes spilling across the table.

"Yes, Steve," she said, forcing politeness. "I've absolutely no idea who the boy is, I don't have a Steven in any of my classes, but with the way Tony goes on about him, you would think this child was everywhere. I've asked his other teachers, and they also have no idea who this Steven is. His math teacher has even gone so far as to suggest that he's pretend! I, of course, said that was completely absurd. How could a thirteen-year-old boy still have an imaginary friend?"

Miss Shreve fixed Maria with beady eyes; Howard was starting to look a little green and Miss Shreve wondered if he would at least have the decency to make it outside before he vomited all over the new marble floors.

Howard wasn't thinking about any of that. With a sudden, startling moment of clarity through his drunken haze, he remembered Steve Rogers, from decades and decades, another lifetime ago, wondered if, just maybe, this was who his son kept talking about. But the nanobots hadn't been broadcasting anything, he remembered that well enough. So how...?

"And so," Miss Shreve was saying, "we would recommend some sort of psychiatric evaluation for Tony. You know, just to make sure that everything's shipshape up top."

"Right, yes, of course," Howard murmured absentmindedly, the first words he'd spoken since entering Miss Shreve's classroom. "I'll make sure of that." He stood up, clasped Maria's hand in his own, forced her up as well. "We'll just be going now so we can attend to this matter as quickly as possible," he said, clumsily fastening Maria's coat around her and stumbling towards the door.

Miss Shreve watched the Starks exit her classroom with narrowed eyes, watched the staggering lean form of Howard Stark as he leaned on Maria and stumbled towards the parking lot. That most definitely wasn't the profile of a Time Magazine's Man of the Year.

* * *

"Anthony," Howard said, his words coming in a blur. "Anthony, I need to talk with you."

His son entered the living room, running a hand through a wild tangle of dark brown curls. Howard looked up at him from his position on the sofa - when had his son gotten so tall? when had his voice gotten so deep? - and gestured for him to take a seat. Instead of sitting down beside him, Tony planted himself in the armchair across from his father and looked at him. Howard swore it was like looking into a mirror, just aged a few decades back. But Tony's look, the expression in his eyes, that was all Maria's. That determination, that steady confidence that Howard felt leaking from him day by day.

"Yes, Father?" Tony asked, his voice quiet. Deep. A man already, grown up while Howard looked the other way. "What did you need to see me for?"

Howard cleared his throat, made himself steady, firmly put down the longing for a nice glass of whiskey.

"I had a talk with one of your teachers this afternoon," Howard said, trying to ignore the pounding headache building behind his eyes. "She mentioned that you were friends with somebody named Steve?"

"Yes?" Tony asked, suddenly cautious. Howard could see it in the tensing of his knuckles on the edges of the armrests. "What about it?"

Howard felt nauseous.

"Is this Steve...real?"

"Of course he's real," Tony said. Indignant now. Howard could see that in himself, just like him when he was still young and reckless. "He's a real person."

"Anthony. This Steve...he can't possibly be the one in your room, right? In the monitor of green specks that's been in there ever since you were a child. That's the Steve you're talking about, isn't it?"

Unguarded for a moment, Howard could see the uncertainty in Tony's eyes, the steeling of his resolve as he lied. "No. It's a Steve at school."

Howard sighed, waved his hand and motioned for Tony to go away. He thought it might ruin his credibility more than it already was if he vomited in front of his son, and as Tony's footsteps tapped away down the hall, Howard sighed again, lay down, and waited for his dizziness to subside.

* * *

A few days later, while Tony was at school, Howard quietly slipped into his son's room. He looked around, at the soft white curtains hanging still, framing the windows gently. He looked at the bookshelves full of comics and engineering texts, the tops dusty with disuse. Howard looked at the various electrical equipment used as decoration, the buckets of huge nuts and bolts and big plastic wrenches with colourful handles, just the right size for a growing baby boy to use. They'd never taken it out of the room, and Tony had never complained about it or taken any initiative to do anything about them.

He let his eyes drift over to the giant monitor on the far wall of the bedroom, hanging above Tony's desk like some black and green abstract artwork. The green dots were still, like they had been the day he brought Tony home from the hospital, and surely that was a sign, wasn't it? That Steve wasn't, couldn't possibly be alive.

He sat down at Tony's desk, rested his chin on a hand, and stared at the green specks, muttering to himself, to Steve if he was still there - the specks on the monitor remained stubbornly still - until he heard Tony and Maria come home.

* * *

Miss Shreve and the other teachers were rather gentle, but rather firm about Tony's psychiatric evaluation. And Howard, too sick with worry about the company and the odd swelling in his abdomen that didn't seem to go down no matter what he did, ignored these incessant requests from Tony's teachers and tried to put the green speckled monitor out of his thoughts for good.

Tony's teachers frowned and chatted about him in the staff lounge during lunch and the breaks the students had in between classes. A favourite topic of gossip was how his psychological adjustment couldn't really be blamed on him; it was all the father's fault, Miss Shreve said over a salad and coffee. Coming in drunk to a mandatory meeting, can you imagine? Didn't even try to hide it.

Poor Maria, she said, her mouth full of lettuce. The poor woman.

Maybe she drove him to drink, another teacher said slyly. I mean, with a face like that, I can't imagine anyone being less than perfect.

Miss Shreve chewed on her salad thoughtfully, and decided privately that that most certainly couldn't be the case. Maria Stark looked too innocent, too timid, to drive anyone to anything. As for the boy, he was sharp, that was a sure thing. But he didn't talk to anyone, not really. He didn't take notes, he wasn't a good student. And it infuriated Miss Shreve - along with all the other teachers - that he still managed to get perfect or near perfect scores.

But without parental consent, no psychiatric evaluation was to be had, and Tony ignored the disapproving glances his teachers gave him while he bent over his notebook and doodled what he imagined Steve would look like. And maybe it was because his name was Steve, maybe it was because Tony really liked him, that the drawings all turned out like the images of Captain America in comic books stuffed along his bookshelves, dusty with disuse.

* * *

_Something very odd happened a few days ago. I didn't tell Tony about it, the poor boy seems to have a lot on his plate at the present moment, but someone besides him started talking to me. It was a man's voice, deeper, weary, his voice slurred like he'd had just a bit too much to drink. _

_He introduced himself as Howard Stark. He asked me if I was Steve Rogers, if I would like to talk to him. _

_Well, I am Steve Rogers, that is very true, but did I want to talk to him? Not at all. _

_I don't know why I feel like this, but I just have the feeling that he's not a very good person, and from the way he treats Tony - with casual disregard and an affectation of disgust, at least from the way Tony describes him - he can't be a very good father either. _

_So I kept very silent, not thinking anything at all, and I could hear his breathing, noisy and ragged. He waited for what felt like centuries, but must have been more like hours, before he finally stood up and went away. _

_Tony came in a few minutes later, talking to me as soon as he got into his room, his words bubbling out rapid and steady, as if he'd been bottling them up all day so he could talk to me. Like he genuinely wanted to talk with me. _

_I know it will sound a bit creepy to you, but it feels very nice to have this sort of attention again. To be the one someone tells everything to, from trivial day to day things to deep thoughts about the universe. Maybe this was what Bucky felt like? I've no idea. Bucky was always surrounded by girls, almost as if he was flaunting them for the world to see, confident in his own sexuality. Heterosexual. Capital H. No room for interpretation, no wiggle room at all. It made me feel strangled, just being around him. _

_But with Tony, I feel...free. I've got ample room to breathe. That doesn't make sense, does it? But it's just what I feel._

_I never imagined I'd ever be able to feel this way. _


	12. The More You Know

Please refer back to Chapter 6 regarding Steve's lack of knowledge about the Holocaust.

Sorry for inaccuracies regarding Howard & Maria Stark, I'm not very familiar with Tony Stark's life story (and by not very familiar, I mean pretty much not at all).

Annette is a complete OC.

Written to: Walls - Tiësto ft. Quilla, crosspost from AO3

* * *

"Mum took me to see a tailor," Tony said to Steve, flopping onto his bed on a warm, breezy fall afternoon. The white gauze curtains framing his window billowed full and soft, and New York City glistened like diamonds below him. "Wouldn't it be funny if all tailors' names were Taylor? I think it might be."

_Why were you going to see a tailor?_ Steve asked, curiously. Tony's mention of the tailor brought back some disjointed memories, of a man with dark hair and a little goatee and a sharp copper-coloured vest holding a measuring tape against him. The tape was cool, and the man whistled to himself as he jotted down a few notes on a clipboard with a blue ballpoint pen. When Steve had craned his neck to look at the paper, he had seen it was filled with a huge list of numbers. He remembered swallowing awkwardly as the man got down on his knees, measuring across his hips with the tape, averting his eyes from that dark, piercing gaze that seemed to drill right into him.

He remembered the same man presenting with a blue suit, fatigue and pride and hope written all over those sharp features. But it wasn't a suit, not the type you'd go dancing in, not the type that looked so delightful on Bucky's shoulders in shades of black and dark navy. What suit was it? Steve tried to think, but Tony was talking again and he lost his train of thought. He privately made a note to think about it some more, perhaps when Tony was sleeping or when he was at school.

"It's for homecoming," Tony explained, hopping off his bed and going over to his desk. "It's a dance to celebrate the start of the school year or something like that, although why anybody would want to celebrate that is beyond me. Mum said I should go, and Rhodey practically forced me to go. He convinced some girl in our history class to go with me, even though I didn't want to go, but Rhodey's my friend and he really wanted to go with Pepper."

_You're not friends with the girl Rhodey set you up with?_ Steve wanted to know, his words scrolling across the screen in lines of green.

"Not really, no," Tony said, leaning back in his desk chair. "She's just some girl that I know. We're acquaintances at best, but I guess Rhodey heard that she really wanted to go and didn't have anybody to go with. I don't get it, though. She seemed super disappointed that I didn't do this big thing and ask her to the dance, like a lot of other guys did. I don't really get that. Shouldn't it be enough that I'm going with her, why should I have to do some big gesture also? Mum would never let me hear the end of it."

_Ha,_ Steve said, and Tony smiled. _That's just the way some people are. And some people aren't like that at all. She's just one of the people that like that sort of stuff, and you're just one of the people that don't like that at all._

"I guess," Tony said, scuffing his feet over the carpet. "What kind of person are you, Steve?"

_Hmmm..._The dots continued over the screen, like Steve was really dedicating a lot of time to thinking about it. After a while, he replied, _I don't really know. I don't think I've ever been put in a position like that. I guess it would have to depend on the person asking me/the person I'm asking. Lots of things depend on other people._

"Yeah, I suppose," Tony said, running his hands through his unruly dark curls. His mum had run her hand through them earlier that day, after they had left the tailor's place, and had told him with a little smile that he ought to get it cut. Tony had disagreed, shaking his head vigorously; Maria had laughed at the way his deep brown curls bounced around and fell over his forehead into his eyes. For the first time in what felt like forever, Maria seemed to be happy, and Tony couldn't help but feel that she would have been much happier if she'd never met Howard. But then that had called into question his own existence, and he didn't much like to think about not existing. He couldn't imagine what it would be like.

"Oh, and guess what Steve?" Tony said, grinning as he caught sight of the letter on his desk again. It was stamped with a crimson crest, with the lettering 'Massachusetts Institute of Technology' written in the border of the circle. Without waiting for Steve to ask what it was Tony sounded so happy about, he continued. "MIT's offered me a position at their school, for electrical engineering. I guess there were some reps at the state robotics competition last year, and they really liked my designs, so they came up and talked to me and sent me an application form. I bet Rhodey's wishing he'd decided to participate in robotics club instead of some boring British literature club."

Even as he said this, Tony felt a pang of regret. Rhodey and he hadn't been so close lately, drifting farther and farther apart. And Pepper certainly wasn't helping any of that, Tony thought, but he supposed it could help if he weren't so petty about things...

_So you're going to go to university? That's fantastic!_ Steve's text looked genuinely excited and proud, and Tony grinned, pushing Pepper out of his mind.

"Well, they said that since I'm still in high school, I can choose to finish that before I go there, but if I just want to go, I can...just go," Tony said, smiling. "I don't even need to graduate."

_Well, you've got time to think about it, I guess,_ Steve said. _I'm sure whatever you decide will be great._

"Did you go to university?" Tony wanted to know. "Do you know what the people there are like?"

_I never had a chance to go,_ Steve admitted. _I never really had money for tuition fees, and my plans all involved going to the army. I wasn't really focused on school. But I think you'll do well there. You're a smart kid._

"I'm a man, now, Steve," Tony corrected, laughing.

The screen just spit out a smile ":)" and Tony whistled to himself while he pulled out his backpack and started his homework. He had a paper due on the Holocaust in European History in a few weeks, and he still had a bunch of things to research for it.

* * *

Maria smiled up at her son as she adjusted his deep blue tie for him, tightening the knot gently and smoothing out the creases in his shirt collar before stepping back to admire her work. Tony was getting to look more and more like Howard by the day.

The Howard she once knew, Maria corrected herself. The Howard who wore suits every day, even on weekends, who had a mischievous quirk to his mouth and a witty retort behind every sentence. The Howard who was confident, self-assured, hard-working. Not the Howard she knew now, the one who sat in his office all day staring into a tumbler of amber whiskey and glancing furtively behind his shoulder every half-second. Not the paranoid, timid, frightened man she knew now, nor the angry, violent man she knew a few years ago. Maria wasn't sure which one she would rather have.

"You look lovely, darling," Maria said, smiling at Tony. She smoothed back his unruly hair - she hadn't managed to convince him to get a haircut - and sighed in mock frustration when the curls insisted on spilling over onto his forehead anyway. "Goodness, your hair just doesn't want to stay put, does it?" she teased him. He shrugged, examining himself in the floor-length mirror.

"Do I have to go?" he asked his mother, standing very still as she took a comb slicked with water and brushed his hair. "I mean, it probably won't be very fun."

"You've already said you would go with her," Maria said, stepping back and examining him critically. It would do, she supposed. "And it really would not do if you broke your promise. You must act the gentleman, always, and nothing short of death or violent illness ought to stop you from a commitment. And besides, your father and I are going out tonight, and it's Jarvis's day off, so I really would feel better if you were with your friends instead of sitting here alone."

Tony sighed, rolled his eyes. And because she was his mother, and he could see the thin strands of grey woven through her dark hair, and because he knew she worried about him, he agreed.

* * *

Her name was Annette, and her father owned an oil company or something like that, Tony thought, looking across at his date as he sipped at his second plastic cup of punch (was punch supposed to be this bitter?) and tried to ignore Rhodey and Pepper batting their eyes at each other only a few inches away.

He'd done everything right, so far, he'd thought. He'd complimented Annette on her dress (a deep blue that matched his tie - Annette had insisted), on the way her curls fell over her shoulders, on how pretty she was. Annette probably knew that he wasn't being sincere, but she had smiled and graciously accepted his compliments all the same. Tony supposed that, objectively, she was a pretty girl, but he didn't feel any attraction whatsoever. She was missing something, but Tony had no idea what it could possibly be.

Rhodey stood up, taking Pepper by the hand, and led her onto the dance floor. Annette looked after them dreamily, and deep inside him, Tony realised that he was supposed to ask her to dance, but he remained firmly in his seat, staring into his punch and adjusting his tie. He was starting to feel rather warm and flushed, and wondered if the air conditioning in the ballroom was broken or something of the like, or if it was because of all the students in here.

Annette looked across at him with a flush creeping up her neck. Not breaking eye contact, she picked up her glass of punch and drained it - Tony watched the smooth line of her throat as she swallowed, thought it was...too smooth, if that were a thing - before reaching across the table, grabbing Tony's hand, and forcing him up. She stumbled on her way to the dance floor, and Tony, not for the first time, wondered why girls bothered to wear heels if they couldn't walk in them. He quickly revised this judgment as he stumbled over to the dance floor, and thought that it must be the level of the floor or something of the like, he certainly wasn't wearing heels.

The room spun dizzily around him, the flashing disco lights overhead blurring into a rainbow of colours as Annette took his hands, placed one in hers, and the other on her waist. They circled around the room, and Annette was speaking to him, saying something, her face getting closer and closer but Tony couldn't hear her, not over the music that throbbed through him, couldn't see her past the flashing lights and the glimpses of Rhodey and Pepper locked in an embrace, Rhodey's back to him always, always, always...

Annette pressed her mouth to his, suddenly. To Tony, the lights stopped flashing, the people around him stopped dancing, the music became a slow, deep pulse in his chest. Suddenly, he was pushing her away, ignoring her hurt look, and the lights were flashing far too much, his head was pounding, everything was moving far too quickly -

Somehow, Tony found himself outside the hotel, hugging his arms to his chest against the slightly chilly evening air. His face was wet, and his breath tasted like metal in his mouth.

He barely had the presence of mind to hail one of the cabbies waiting outside the hotel and tell him his address. He sank into the backseat of the car, smelling the leather and cigarettes embedded into the seats. It was familiar, it was soothing, and he breathed deeply and watched the flashing lights of the city around him.

* * *

The apartment was silent - Jarvis was on his day off, and his parents had gone out to celebrate the opening of some new factory in Manhattan or something of the like, and most likely wouldn't be back until much later.

Tony barged into his room, hurriedly unknotting his blue tie with one hand and tossing it to the side, running his other hand through his dark hair and mussing it up. He was crying, he wasn't sure why, but that had been his first kiss, and his mother had always told him to have your first kiss with somebody that you really, truly liked and cared about. He hadn't liked Annette, not like that, and he'd lost his first kiss and the room was spinning and it was still too hot...

He unbuttoned his starched white dress shirt, shrugged out of his, out of the dress slacks, and let the clothes puddle on the floor in an unorganised pile, leaving him in cotton boxers and a white undershirt. He pushed open the window, letting the cool night air against his skin.

_Back already?_ Steve asked, his monitor lighting up with the green text in the room's darkness. _Is the dance over already? I thought these were supposed to go on for a long time._

"I didn't feel like dancing anymore," Tony muttered, trying to hold back tears as he sat down in front of his computer and tried to think about something, anything but the dance and Rhodey and Pepper and Annette and what he was going to do when he saw her again on Monday.

There was a moment of stillness. _Don't cry,_ Steve said, and how he knew was beyond Tony's comprehension, but those words on the screen made the tears come faster and before Tony knew it he was crying and sobbing and telling Steve everything, from how the punch was bitter and his shoes were too tight and how she had kissed him and she didn't want him to -

_It's alright, shh, shh,_ and Steve was making those noises that he'd been making ever since Tony had met him, and it continued until Tony's breath came in short little hiccups and his eyes were red and raw and there were no more tears to be had.

He was exhausted, but didn't feel like sleeping. Sirens wailed in the street beneath him, and Tony absentmindedly wondered where they were going, so many sirens, so frantically, as he opened a new browser window on his computer and began to research more facts about the Holocaust for his paper. The accounts from survivors were bonechilling, and Tony thought about how his father and what he might have done in World War II - Howard didn't really talk about that, not that he did much talking to Tony anymore.

_You should try to sleep,_ Steve told him, his box of green text interrupting Tony's typing. _Crying always makes one tired._

"I'm not sleepy, not really," Tony said, but because he was glad Steve was worrying about him, he continued, "But I'll go to sleep in a bit, after I finish the outline for this paper."

_What are you writing your paper on?_ Steve wanted to know. _Lots of police tonight,_ he added, as more sirens wailed past. Tony hadn't been counting, but he felt sure that whatever had happened, it must have been something really bad.

"I'm writing about the Holocaust," Tony explained, looking at the brochure for the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. "It's for my European History class."

_I can't imagine there's too much to write about a book burning,_ Steve said.

Tony arched an eyebrow at the screen, even though he knew Steve couldn't see him. "Gee, where've you been?" he asked, jotting down some facts from the brochure. "It wasn't just a book burning. It was a lot more than that, everybody knows that."

A long pause, like Steve was trying to process this. _What do you mean?_ he asked cautiously.

"Lots and lots of people died," Tony explained. "The Nazi Germans killed people that they didn't think were up to par with their visions for an ideal race."

_I do suppose hundreds of thousands of people is quite a lot,_ Steve agreed, and Tony just scoffed. Rolled his eyes.

"No wonder school wasn't for you, Steve," he said, his words starting to slur together. Downstairs, the door banged open, and the noise drove itself into Tony's brain. "Not if you can't remember stuff like that. It wasn't just hundreds of thousands of people."

There were footsteps racing up the stairs, and Tony was privately impressed that his father was able to run so fast in the state he was probably in. Howard usually came back drunk after outings like this, and the footsteps were far too heavy to be Maria's light tread.

_How many...?_ Steve's response was reluctant, as if he didn't want to know.

"Eleven million people," Tony said, and very suddenly, he wished he hadn't said it. A scream howled through his room, a wordless shout so filled with pain and anger and terror that drilled into Tony's brain and made him press his hands against his eyes and plead with whatever gods existed for it to stop. Green text was filling his screen at a rapid rate, huge A's and H's and strings of gibberish punctuated with the number "11" over and over again. As if Steve couldn't believe it, though Tony thought it was common knowledge.

Jarvis burst into his room, breathing heavily, to find Tony trying to find a way to turn his speakers off. He noticed the tear tracks on Tony's face, hurried over and cradled the young master in his arms, trying very hard not to cry himself.

"Oh, you poor boy, you poor boy," Jarvis kept repeating over and over, stroking his hand through Tony's dark curls. Tony's cheek was pressed up against the butler's starched shirt (did Jarvis ever dress in casual clothing, Tony wondered), and he vaguely wondered how Jarvis knew he was upset about Annette and the dance and the kiss.

"How did you know?" Tony asked, pulling back from Jarvis's tight embrace and wondering why there were tears in his eyes. "About Annette?"

"Annette? Who's that?" Jarvis asked. "Oh," he breathed, as he suddenly realised Tony had no idea what was going on. "Oh, young master, oh. Something terrible has happened. Your parents were in a car accident -"

Tony stopped breathing, could barely think over the screaming, could barely hear Jarvis mention things like "killed instantly," "driving home," "two external casualties..."

And then Jarvis was wrapping him in a tight embrace again, rocking him, and Tony suddenly realised that the screaming was coming from him.


	13. Pennies and Salt

Written to: Wrapped in Piano Strings - Radical Face, crosspost from AO3

* * *

_Eleven million people. That seems...just impossible. Eleven million? No, no, Tony must have been saying it wrong. But he wouldn't lie to me, he wouldn't lie about that kind of thing just to hurt me. At least, I don't think so. _

_I...I just can't fathom that. How can eleven million people just, in the span of a few years, be dead? I couldn't even begin to know eleven million people in this lifetime. Not even if you counted the ones I'd know in the next life, or the one after that, or hundreds of thousands of lives after that. If you believe in reincarnation, that is. I don't know what I believe. _

_I think I'm sort of forced to believe in it. I must be dead. There isn't any other logical explanation for it. _

_I remember operating some kind of vehicle, one with lots of different levers and buttons and gadgets, but I didn't focus on anything, couldn't focus on anything because there was nothing rushing up at me. Nothing? That's not the right word to describe it. It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't something either. It was just...blackness, studded through with little specks of white that were ice. I've deduced that recently. It was ice. I'm at least eighty percent sure of that. _

_Eighty percent because I remember being cold. It's not so much a memory as a feeling. _

_But it could just be that Tony's not talking to me. He's lost his parents. I know how that feels, I remember when my mother died, not wanting to talk to anyone for ages, just wanting to sit in doorsteps and hallways and dark corners and hope that nobody would see and pay attention. That's when I took up drawing, I think, as a way to remind myself that I was still there, that I was still Steve Rogers. In retrospect, I wish I had taken it up sooner. I've all but forgotten the sound of my mother's voice, the way she would smile at me as Buck and I came running in after school. I can just barely remember the faded scent of cold cream and clean linen that always seemed to hang about her, the way she would bite at her lip as she hung up the washing in the front yard and prayed for it not to rain, how she would sit down in front of her vanity every morning and night and apply dabs of white lotion to her cheeks from a pale pink jar. _

_Tony hasn't been talking to me, but I've heard some things. Scuffing. Banging. Papers rustling, doors slamming, sobbing into the quietness. I really do want to talk to him, maybe I could help him feel better. But would I know just what to say? Probably not. _

_From conversations I've overheard in the recent past, this older man, Jarvis, has been tossing about words like "spring transfers" and "not pressing charges" and "driving under the influence." I don't know what this means. How this relates to the scuffling, and banging, and quiet crying when he thinks nobody is listening. _

_I've been trying to talk to him, my words scrolling out mindlessly across the universe, but I guess he's not receiving them or he's not reading them. I'm not sure which one I'd prefer. Neither, really. _

_And what are my words, really? Empty sentiments, letters across a surface. _

_Don't cry._

_I care about you. _

_It will be okay. _

_I said that last one to someone once. Who was it? It was a woman, I think. Someone with bouncy dark curls and a brightly red smile. We were friends. I made a promise to her. The only reason I remember that is because I was talking to her as the nothing came towards me, and I told her it was going to be okay, even though I think she knew I was lying. My last words to her were a lie, and it's been bothering me ever since. _

_"So, Steven," the priest would say to me on Friday afternoons as I climbed into the latticed confessional box at the Catholic church. "What have you got for me to hear today?" _

_I would sit there in that musty confessional box, my toes barely touching the floor, the dusty sunlight streaming in through the tiny holes in the wood. On the other side of the lattice was Father Joseph, though I could barely see him, and, for all I know, it could have been someone else. Another priest, another little boy like myself. My mother always confessed before me, stepping out of the box looking fresh and relieved and happy. I would always come out afterwards, not feeling particularly any different. _

_"I've lied this week," I would more often than not say. The priest would tut, remind me of the Ninth Commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbours," and send me off with a penance of three or four Hail Marys. _

_As I grew older, the confessional box seemed to squeeze in on me from all sides, the dusty air getting too hard to breathe, too hot to stand for more than a few moments. And I began to lie inside it as well. _

_"Steven, is there anything else you would like to confess?" the priest would ask. _

_I would trace the latticework, crumbling and dusty beneath my fingertips. I would think about my mother, waiting patiently outside and wondering what was taking me so long, what would I possibly have to confess, her patience turning to worry as the seconds ticked by. I would think about Bucky, the blossoming sprout of love inside me, and I would peek through the lattice at the priest, and tell him, "No." _

_I carried that love around with me, hopeful, blooming and flowering in the rays of his sunny smile, trodden by the girls he always seemed to have around. It was resilient, though, and always managed to worm its way back up to constrict at my heart, to bloom into the image of his face as I lay on my bed at night, the way his mouth would stretch around the sound of my name as I tried to ignore the heat in my face and stomach. _

_After my mother died, the air inside the chapel became too stifling, the pews became a prison, and one Sunday, I woke up and realised with a slow smile that I was free. The chains of verses and the shackles of Hail Marys all fell away, and the love that I held hidden inside me blossomed and grew rampant without the suffocating air of the confessional box to hold it back. _

_Excuse me a moment. I know you're excited to hear about my thrilling life story, and what little I can remember, but Tony is talking._

"Steve. Steve. Are you there?"_ His voice is thick, tired. Like he's all cried out. _

_"I'm here." _

_A silence. From both of us. Shock. _

"You...you're talking."_ Disbelief. I can't quite bring myself to believe it either. _

_"I...I guess I am." _

_I guess my mouth, though I can't feel it at present, is moving in time with my thoughts. It tastes like pennies, like hot metal. _

"Well...okay, I'll think about that later. But, Steve, I'm sorry."_ He's crying. _"I'm so sorry."

_"Don't be sorry. Don't cry. Please, Tony." _

_This only makes him sob harder, his sounds choked off as though he's biting down on his knuckles to keep himself from making noise. It hurts to listen to, and it tastes like pennies and salt. _

_"We don't have to talk about it. It'll be okay. I promise." And there I go again. Liar. _

"Can you...can you just talk to me until I fall asleep?" _he asked, and even though he's a young man, almost an adult now, his tone brings me back to his eight year old self. Crying and hiding under the covers while his father shouted and slammed doors. _

_"Of course we can. What would you like to talk about?" I asked. _

_"_Something. Anything_," he pleads, and against the taste of hot metal and salt in my mouth, I tell him about the penguin waiters I think about and how silly they would be slipping across the ice and balancing trays of champagne. _

_He listens, a little hesitant laugh slipping out as I told him about how they would accept sardines as tips, and my voice gets quieter and quieter as he hiccups once, twice, his breathing smoothing out deep and steady. _

_"Tony?"_

_After a few moments, he speaks, his voice drowsy, his vowels blurred and stuck together. _

_"_Who's going to love me?_" he asked. "_I buried Mum and Dad today._" _

_I was quiet for a few moments. _

_"I love you," I said, the words unfamiliar on my tongue. They tasted sweet, hopeful, and, much to my surprise, perfectly natural. As if I had been waiting all this time to say it at exactly the right moment, but I had known it all along._

_He laughed, tiredly. "_Thank you_," he said quietly. "_That means a lot to me._" _

_I listened quietly, patiently, as his breathing smoothed out deep and even again, and hoped that he fell asleep with a smile on his face. _


End file.
